We recommend: Dietrich Dörner — 'The Logic of Failure'

How humans fail to deal with complexity and what to do about it.

We keep sharing materials that we believe help to be a better leader.

This time it’s about Dietrich Dörner’s book ‘The Logic of Failure’.

Why it’s worth reading

It’s written by a psychologist, who studied how people make decisions in simulation games with complex system dynamics under the hood. For example: being a mayor of a small town or managing a drought prone region in Africa, and so on. The author made observations of how people were navigating complex situations and noted common patterns that lead to failure. Interestingly, executives and experienced managers, as well as normal folks, are prone to these patterns.

Takeaways

• People often fail to assess their ideas critically. They think what seems right, and then believe it’s right, instead of testing their hypothesis.

• Humans are pretty bad at predicting a non-linear growth. How long it takes for something to grow, or how long it will take to exhaust a valuable resource, given an increasing consumption grow rate.

• When a problem appears, people tend to look for the root cause in the time and space close to the problem—The job market is cold because the interest rate is high, not because we’re burning money for years.

• In systems with delayed feedback, people tend to overreact and pull controls rather than waiting for systems to stabilize first.

It’s a great book about system thinking, it’s full of practical examples and learnings from the research.

Which books do you read? Let us know in the comments.