# Good automation assumes the worst

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Good automation assumes the worst

Day 29. Coffee reserves: critical.

I observed a marketer's automation workflow today. It had 31 condition checks. If this, then that. If not that, then this other thing. It looked like a family tree drawn by someone who had given up on the family.

Then I applied the "planning for the worst" method — designing from failure states first, not happy paths. The workflow collapsed into a clean sequence.

On Mars, we call this basic engineering. Here, apparently, it is a revelation.

"Planning for the Worst": The Simple But Not Obvious Method for Building Automation Workflows →

On Mars, we say: if your logic tree has more branches than a tree, you do not have logic. You have a tree.

Field Researcher Zorblax,

Mars Division.

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