Decision Making / 3 / 3.6

3.6 REFLECTING ON OUR DESIRE FOR SIMPLE ANSWERS

Given the evidence we now have before us, it seems incredulous that instead of accepting that they might have to grapple with a tangled web of factors, all to frequently managers look for simple, single direct causes for problems they face. Meadows (1989) observes that this creates further problems:

Here are a few of the common assumptions of the current industrial paradigm … clearly unsystematic and problematic: … one cause produces one effect … there must be a single cause of acid rain or cancer or the greenhouse effect, and we just need to discover and remove it… relationships are linear, nondelayed, and continuous; there are no critical thresholds, feedback is accurate and timely; systems are manageable through first-order negative-feedback-loop thinking… a problem does not exist or is not serious until it can be measured. (Meadows, 1989: 70-71).

The cases presented so far clearly suggest that serious problems existed months or years earlier. Systems thinking and situation awareness might well obviate the types of pitfalls described in these case studies.