And people often get credit for fixing issues they partially created.
Human groups work on shallow signalling and distributed confusion.
Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
131–140 of 274 posts
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#132Since Covid nearly everyone in Germany knows this saying: "There is no glory in prevention."
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#133You'll see capability traps everywhere once you learn about them. Sterman, Repenning and other collaborators wrote several papers after this one. All fascinating and almost entirely depressing. Especially since MIT's Sloan school, where system dynamics first became a discipline, is just around the bend from Harvard Business school, where system dynamics first became ignored.
One thing I don't get about the concept of capability traps is why is it expected that a company which is good at one thing would be capable at the new thing? What exactly makes a capability trap a trap?
I think because it’s a negative feedback cycle. So once it starts it’s hard to go back, the deeper you are the harder. A trap is something that’s easy to get into and hard to get out of.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#134But the same person can get paid for it. So there is an incentive to create, or at least pretend problems.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#135Article published in the Summer 2001 edition of California Management Review, yet it never mentioned Y2K, the first thing I thought of when I read the line "fixing problems that never happened". Perhaps it was actually written in 1999 and took a while to get published, because otherwise that seems a very strange omission. The Y2K problem was very much over-hyped by the American news media at the time (no, at no point…
The problem is that a lot of people have a very binary view on life. Either something is a complete success or a complete waste of money, rarely do we accept that most projects fall somewhere in the middle.
The binary view is mostly true, unless it's for events or problems they are themselves familiar with. There is a term for this, but can't for the life of me remember it: People think the problems they are dealing with are infinitely more nuanced, complex and unique than the problems other people are dealing with.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#136I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves. Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on. It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between…
By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities. Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organisation isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sen…
> If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities.
At some point in one's early single-digit they learn that touching hot stuff hurts. They start to avoid stuff that they know is hot, but still come in contact with hot stuff accidentally. Later they learn techniques minimizing probability of touching hot stuff even by accident. By the time one reaches twenty or so, the only times a person burns themselves is really by being way too reckless.
> Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organization isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sending the pain signals upward before just repairing it.
Should we accept that management as a whole is in general more clueless than your average teenager? The "learning opportunity" should, ideally, happen exactly once, realistically once in a very rare while.
> It's important to coach people on the idea that in large group sizes, it's more efficient to let certain kinds of problems play out and not be so reactive to them.
You are conflating two things here, I guess. Yes, some "problems" are not worth to be fixed proactively or at all, but that has very little to do with group sizes, it's a "simple" cost-benefit tradeoff. As groups grow the left hands tend to become increasingly unaware of what the right is doing and that is the primary reason why we have management class in the first place.
The problem OP raises is attention span of the metaphorical gold fish in the management layers. Even if a department does everything in their power to communicate impending problems, do risk weighed cost-benefit analyses, get proactive treatments pre-approved by higher management, the same higher management forgets the risks and costs savings once they have been mitigated, effectively incentivizing firefighting. Some teams gradually fall into eternal firefighting and burn out, others start manufacturing fires to get rewarded. The biggest problem is that it is nearly impossible to tell the two apart.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#137I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves. Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on. It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between…
> It's a serious problem in this industry
It’s not a problem in this industry, it’s a problem everywhere.
> I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come from engineering.
You mean the engineers who are causing the chaos you’re complaining about?
Engineers aren’t some magic group of people who know better than others - we’re just as fallible as other people.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like this is a cultural symptom and something many people are hoping to solve in healthcare. Basically we treat solving problems as amazing rather than preventing problems. You get rewarded if you treat a sickness instead of keeping a healthy person healthy. This is the same thing. We need to reward things never going wrong as a society since this is pervasive.
> something many people are hoping to solve in healthcare Respectfully, the solution is don't smoke, exercise, eat well, sleep, avoid stressors... These aren't easy problems but their solution isn't at the individual patient level and is a simple question of capital and political will. The 'hope' envisages a product to temporize the solution while extracting large payments.
Nope, I believe you are wrong: a path where we, for example, forbid smoking because the statistics point at it correlating with many health problems, is a world where we use the same statistical tool to prescribe human behavior to the last detail. It is not just about smoking, alcohol, late night dancing, switching sex partners, fast driving on a track, paragliding, skydiving, climbing, car driving, bicycle driving, motor biking, even staying late for astronomical observations (sleep patterns?)... all carry insignificant risk when looked at statistically.
> ...avoid stressors...
Most stress is caused by a conflict between our expectations/motivations and the reality (everyone else's).
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#139Pendatically speaking, people do get credit for fixing problems that never happened.
E.g. if the problems are quantifiable and there's a record, like dropping homicides from 100 per year to 20 per year in a city. Those extra homicides "didn't happen", but the improvement is understood.
For an one-off problem, it depends on how clear the path to the problem is. An electrician doing an inspection and noticing and fixing big electrical issues in the installation, would be appreciated, even if the accidents didn't happen.
Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities. Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organisation isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sen…
Honestly? I’m just super direct with the exec team now after trying to do this dance. Obviously this is not allowed at every company, I’m just lucky to be at a place where the company culture allows for this. I’ll ask for something preventative or that otherwise hardens our systems. They ask “is it a need ?” and I’ll say something like “we can function without, but that means we have a 5-10% chance in the next 6mo of…
An example that not all companies are run by idiots. The job market is not a healthy market though, where its more important to know ppl then to be great at some skill. But if leadership sucks just leave if you can, that will fix the problem.