In Part 2 of this article, I explained that, without careful thought, intervention in a complex situation will, more often than not, lead to unintended consequences. If we don’t lift our game, I promise you. we’ll be left stumbling in the dark. Here, I’ll describe two best practices that overcome these problems. Best practice 1: […]

Decision failure patterns in complex environments The two decision failures I covered in Part 1 have different causes, but follow similar patterns. The hit man example is a case of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”: the unintended consequences of achieving the outcome end up nullifying that very same outcome, as shown below: If […]

Many years ago, I was hooked on reading crime thrillers, especially the kind that ended with an unexpected twist. One of these in particular has stuck in my mind to this day because the idea behind it resonated with so much of what I was discovering in my academic and professional life, both at the […]