Following on from last week's post on Dietrich Dörner's The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations, I had this experience at a client site recently.
The conference room was too warm, so I took off my jacket. Our host went over to adjust the thermostat near the door. Within fifteen minutes the room was too chilly, and on went my jacket again. Then the director came in and adjusted the thermostat up. Ten minutes later it was too warm, and I took my jacket back off. We were in the room two hours and it never settled into a comfortable temperature despite several more readjustments.
The moral is that, as Dörner pointed out, people have difficulty understanding control situations in which effect lags cause. In this case, the room took a while to cool down after the thermostat was set lower. The host tried to compensate this by moving it down a larger degree, hoping that this would result in faster response, when in fact it resuled in a far cooler room. The director then overcorrected, and the room was too warm. It's good to have a healthy dose of humility when dealing with complex situations. We control much less that we think we do, and the controls we put in place often give us more than we want. Better to watch and wait for a while, and make small, incremental movements.
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