“The Dark Knight” starts with Batman pushing the criminals too hard. To Batman’s dismay, the criminals turn to Joker, who unleashes chaos Gotham never saw before.
Among the themes in Nolan’s G.O.A.T., the dominant is ESCALATION. As Joker taunts Batman: “There’s no going back. You’ve changed things… forever.”
Israel’s tactics worked for a while. Until the terrorists responded with a fiercer attack on civilians. Eliminating leaders of terrorist groups seemed to work. Until the vacuum was filled in by leaders far worse and ruthless.
When it concerns humans or systems, the linear mode of thinking rarely works. Like chess, the moment the opponent makes an unexpected move, your game-plan is out of the window.
“Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. . . . Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.” —Russell Ackoff, operations theorist
At a company I worked at ages ago, nobody would leave before 8 PM. Because it was assumed you were short of work, and assigned more. As a result, people gave an appearance of effort all day and worked in the last 1-2 hours. An incorrect desired behavior was upheld, leading to employee stress without any attendant productivity gains.
At the peak of the pandemic, we introduced a webinar initiative. For the first few months, the demand increased incrementally. Until it plateaued and eventually tapered off. Webinar fatigue had set in. Our audience had initially welcomed the learning opportunities remote work offered. Now, they were seeking a return to normalcy.
We all understand non-linearity at some level. The stone stays unperturbed at the first nine hammer hits. And cracks into two at the tenth. It applies to the work environment too.
By your very act of participation in the game, you’re changing the game (or at least changing the rules of the game).
“But my intentions were good,” many may exclaim. The purposes of your plan will be inferred by the behavior or results it produces; it’s rarely judged by your stated goals.
We’re well-trained in analytical reasoning where we break the problem into smaller pieces, and attempt to find a path from cause to effect. This causes us to think that there always is a “fix” to our problem “out there”.
However, there are some problems that refuse to yield solutions this way. Problems like unemployment, economic instability, societal frictions, etc. Because these are “systems problems”.
The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analyzing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. ~ Sri Aurobindo
System problems are “rooted in the internal structure of complex systems.” They are, “undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them.”
For a comprehensive study of this problem, and how to solve them, head on to Donella Meadows’ “Thinking in Systems: A Primer”.
Let’s deep dive into systems problems in the next edition.
Musings by Madhav 
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