Morgan Housel at Collaborative Fund had a post this week called Why Things Break. Several layers of abstraction away from software engineering, nonetheless I think there’s a lot to learn in studying generalized fragility. 

This post enumerates five ways success can lead to fragility:

• Success pushes you away from whatever made you successful to begin with
• Success increases size, size increases complexity, complexity plants landmines
• Success teaches you how to win the last war, which becomes the only war you know how to fight
• Success reduces the impression of needing room for error
• What looked like success was random, mismeasured, or a temporary trend