What is partial failure design?

Partial failure design is a concept in personal epistemology: Design your systems to fail partially rather than completely.

Example: You run a weekly review every Sunday that covers five domains: health, work, relationships, finances, and personal projects. One Sunday, a family emergency consumes your entire afternoon. A brittle system collapses — you skip the review entirely, then skip the next one because you already 'fell behind,' and within a month the practice is dead. A gracefully degrading system has fallback modes: if you cannot do the full review, you do a three-minute version that covers only the top two domains. If you cannot do even that, you open the template and write one sentence about the single most important thing that happened this week. The system loses fidelity, but it never loses continuity. And continuity — not perfection — is what compounds.

This concept is part of Phase 25 (Error Correction) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for error correction.