The “it can’t happen here” syndrome is persistent, and consistently defies experience. Why is that?
I recently read about a bridge in a developing economy that had been built too low for traffic to pass under it. The solution? Lower the road.
The question is, how long did it take them to realize they were building it too low? And, why did they finish it anyway?
But, of course, this can happen anywhere, and the developed world is filled with like examples. Terminal 5 is perhaps the most recent, but hardly a rarity.
And, events like these occur all over the world, at all sorts of levels, in all sorts of endeavors. From the military to politics to commerce, people seem to marry their ill-fated ventures, cross their fingers as tightly as can be, and simply hope that what they know will happen, won’t.
What’s at the bottom of this? Groupthink? The sense by an executive that too much personal credibility has been invested to back out? Shortsighted bootlicking by juniors? Starstruck “followers” who simply don’t think to examine what they’re being asked to do?
What sort of organizational cultures permit behaviors like those? What are your conjectures about this?
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Today’s tip: Speaking of following through on more or less obvious disasters, here’s a glacially unfolding one for you: Rob Jacobs, author of Education Innovation, has offered an insightful glimpse at how we likely are mis-organizing something as simple and fundamental as our classrooms.
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Technorati Tags: experience, developing, economy, developed, Terminal 5, endeavor, military, politics, commerce, ventures, Groupthink, executive, credibility, bootlicking, followers, organization, culture, Rob Jacobs, Education Innovation
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6 Comments
Sometimes, Jim, I think it’s target fixation. There is such a strong need in humans to remain consistent with earlier decisions that often we sacrifice doing the right thing on the altar of consistency.
And there’s the confusion of a sunk cost with an investment. The understanding of those two concepts is reason enough to require every manager to take an economics course.
Jim, thanks for the link. Some of education monumental failures result from a sense of powerlessness. Politicians create new laws, and then we build building, programs, etc on what will keep us out of trouble and in compliance. So imagine a bridge built by education. It would be only exactly what the plan said, not what it intended, so as things fail or don’t work out, no adjustments are made to the building. Stick to the plan, damn the results.
You end up with one strange looking bridge; occasionally functional, ugly, and over budget.
Jim,
Wally’s reasons are sure familiar ones.
I would imagine that the root causes vary if you investigate each case. Yet the question still remains, “Who was responsible for oversight and why wasn’t it carried out?”
There is always a single individual who had the power and responsibility to do something but didn’t.
That’s why we’re so hot on continuing to encourage and develop effective leaders.
Hello Wally,
That’s a great catch, Wally - thanks! Target fixation. That’s a big cause of this, that’s right.
Sometimes the decision alone closes, narrows your options, denying you perspective that could draw you out of the narrowing trap you’re entering.
Sometimes each decision carries with it a perceptual framework that does that (dysfunctional) job even more effectively.
And the thing is, the intensity of the work can cause the whole team to get lost in the target fixation, so no one is able to see the approaching danger.
It’s like a high-performance aerial acrobatic team, like the Thunderbirds or the Blue Angels. Some of the maneuvers are so intricate and unforgiving that all the wingmen must focus exclusively on their relative position to the leader, and the leader focuses in turn on the necessary landmarks. If the leader gets lost in one of those landmarks, the whole team piles into it.
Thanks Wally!
Hi Rob,
Well, it was a great post, and fit the occasion perfectly - it was my pleasure.
And what a great analogy you drew with the post in your comment.
Thanks again, and keep up the innovative writing on education!
Hello Steve,
You’re so right - the key point, really: “There is always a single individual who had the power and responsibility to do something but didn’t.”
The question is why didn’t he or she? It’s a fascinating question I think, and one that unearths just as many actionable insights as more positive phenomena do about how to encourage and develop effective executives to combat it.
This topic probably deserves more discussion.
Thanks again, Steve!
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