Thursday, November 21, 2013

Mistake Bank Bookshelf: "The Logic of Failure"

This week’s selection on the bookshelf is an amazing book I discovered thanks to a tweet from Roxanne Persaud (@commutiny), The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations by Dietrich Dörner. It was published in English in 1995, but is still (apart from a couple of dated references to the difficulty computers have playing world-class chess) amazingly current.

Dörner is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Bamburg. In the book, he discusses many psychological simulations that illustrate how difficult it is for people to manage in complex environments. In the experiments, subjects are given a complex objective – say, to manage the well-being of an African tribal community by allocating water, seeds, etc. – and the ability to make periodic interventions. Due to the many psychological biases and blind spots we have, this task is very difficult, and very few participants can successfully keep things as good as they had been before the simulation began (many result in the collapse of the society). Participants develop tunnel vision, overcorrect for mistakes, and act before thinking. I have done some of these exercises and have suffered a similar fate. The few successful subjects observe before acting, develop an understanding of the interrelation of the system’s parts, and manage side effects. The average performance in this simulation might be cause to keep us humble about our ability to successfully intervene in the developing world.

One factor complicating the ability to manage complex systems is the time lag between cause and effect that these systems demonstrate. When a change is ordered, the result may not be seen for days/weeks/months, and may even be obscured by other factors. Dörner’s illustration of the difficulty subjects had with a relatively simple task containing such a lag (regulating the temperature in a room by adjusting a dial) will give pause to anyone thinking about proposed technological solutions to manage global warming.

There is a powerful amount of insight in this book. Some examples:

If, the moment something goes wrong, we no longer hold ourselves responsible but push the blame onto others, we guarantee that we remain ignorant of the real reasons for poor decisions, namely, inadequate plans and failure to anticipate the consequences….

This tendency to “oversteer” is characteristic of human interaction with dynamic systems. We let ourselves be guided not by development within the system, that is, by time differentials between sequential stages, but by the situation at each stage. We regulate the situation and not the process….

Clear goals will give us guidelines and criteria for assessing the appropriateness or inappropriateness of measures we might propose.

The Logic of Failure is a wise book with ample lessons. While it points out where our instincts get us into trouble, its point of view is generous and sympathetic. As a companion to Kahneman’s Thinking Fast or Slow or Taleb’s Antifragile, it is highly recommended.

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