There is a particular form of organisational failure that does not announce itself as failure, because the difficult decision is, in the end, made. It is simply made later, and made through a harder process than the timely course would have required. I want to examine this pattern, because it is both common and instructive, and because it reveals something about the ethics of avoidance that the more dramatic failures tend to obscure. The decision that is deferred is not thereby avoided. It is merely surrendered to worse conditions.