Feeding My Ignorance

The Law of Unintended Consequences has been recognised for a long time. I myself am fond of stating that the thing that will trip you up or cause a project to go awry is always the thing that you failed to consider - all of the planning and preparation and decision making that is carried out is premised on the fact that everything is known - this law suggests that premise is always wrong (assuming you are dealing with anything other than a very simple system).

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Of course, not every unintended consequence results in a disaster - some are just minor incoveniences - others can provide positive benefit. There are, of course, many reasons why we fail to "think of everything" - chief amongst them is the fact that it is not possible to do so!!! (sadly, some think and act as though they can achieve this) One trap that we often fall into is a lack of understanding of the dynamics, or feedback, present in the system - and even simple feedback can result in dramatic consequences if it is not understood.

This lovely little story tells how two booksellers who were 'gaming' the amazon selling system ended up in a bizarre pricing war. Now the feedback diagram for this is particularly simple - it is only (in systems dynamics parlance) two stocks and two flows linked to each other (you can see the diagram in this blog). However, both parties involved failed to join up the dynamics to see how the other's actions would affect their own. It is a timely warning that we do tend to ignore the dynamics - even of simple systems.

When the systems get complex we often just give up and don't even try to understand the dynamics. This is where we need something more than a static structure model, we really do need to understand the way in which the system behaves over time and that requires quite different skills to those needed to generate an efficient data model.