John writes, ‘Performance is not something you can just bolt on to an existing system. Just like you cannot bolt on fire safety to an inadequately designed building after it has been built’. The key is to build in the information systems and diagnostic tools that allow you to monitor performance before things go wrong, and to track the cause once they do. Without these tools all you are left with is trial and error.

In the field of fire safety this is known as passive firefighting, that is, the building does it by itself, simply standing there as it does what it was built to do.