While we should hold leaders accountable, we shouldn’t expect our leaders to personally risk embarrassment when making the safest choices on our behalf. Life-threatening emergency conditions are notorious for their tipping points, when things suddenly get much worse through a cascade of unwanted events. Snow is a great example of this. When a snow emergency is closing in, why do we close roads? But that decision wasn’t so simple because of the huge costs such closure incurs, especially if the emergency doesn’t materialize as forecast.

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