Exercise 1: Why Uniform Maximum Scrutiny Is Counterproductive — Possible Solution ==================================================================== WHAT THIS CHAPTER SAYS ------------------------------ Per this chapter, "treating a low-stakes question with the same suspicion as a password reset just trains people to route around your process rather than follow it." WHAT "ROUTING AROUND THE PROCESS" ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE ------------------------------ If every single request - including "how do I connect to the guest Wi-Fi?" - gets subjected to independent callback verification and out-of-band confirmation, coworkers quickly learn that going through support for anything is slow and frustrating. The predictable result isn't that people become more careful - it's that they start finding informal workarounds (asking a colleague directly, guessing settings themselves, or, worse, simply pushing back harder on legitimate verification requests because "it's always like this anyway"). WHY THIS IS WORSE THAN INCONSISTENT SCRUTINY ------------------------------ A process people quietly bypass provides zero protection - it's not even inconsistently effective, it's actively ignored. Meanwhile, the genuinely high-risk requests (the ones verification actually needs to catch) get the same friction as everything else, so there's no signal left to tell a technician "slow down, this one matters more." Uniform maximum scrutiny doesn't raise the floor - it erases the very distinction the verification process exists to draw. WHY TIERED SCRUTINY SOLVES BOTH PROBLEMS ------------------------------ By reserving heavy verification for genuinely high-risk requests, the friction that remains is meaningful rather than routine - people encounter it rarely enough that it still reads as "this one is different," which is precisely the signal a flat, maximum-everywhere policy destroys. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ It quotes the chapter's own reasoning, explains concretely what "routing around the process" looks like in practice, and explains why uniform scrutiny is worse than merely inefficient - it actively destroys the distinction verification is meant to preserve.