After reading this post you will know:
- What System Traps are
- How to spot them
- Actions to take against System Traps
Daily living is full of traps. Quitting sugar is more challenging than quitting cocaine, social media is optimized for you to stay online as long as possible, and telling a bride that she could have exercised a bit more, will lead to the mother hunting you down and making it look like a bloody accident. One of these examples may be pure stupidity; Nevertheless, the others are traps we have to face daily. Understanding the trap and learning mechanics to cope with them is essential, to avoid a downward spiral.
As Decision Scientists, we must understand those traps; In order to, understand what effects a decision can have and how it might manifest. There are seven System Traps you should be on the lookout (full disclosure: there is an eight System Trap and I most certainly will not participate in this battle). We will talk about each System Trap, how to spot them, and what to do against them.
Policy Resistance – Fixes that Fail
In the 1930s, Romania and Sweden faced a population decline. The first country outlawed abortions. At first, birth rate was rising until it fell back to the initial value with an increased mortality rate of young women. It turned out that civilians could not afford to have more children, and they chose abortion nonetheless. Sweden, on the other hand, talked with their residents and found out that raising a child needs social security and also the wish to do so. Their approach succeeded. [1]
The difference is that one country tried to simply force their opinion upon their civilians; Whereas, the other country found a solution via cooperation.
The System Trap can be found over and over again: The XBOX controversy of “all online”, WhatsApp’s data-sharing with Facebook, and New Coke. In every example the new policy was forced upon the user.
The solution: understanding the underlying problem and cooperation!
The Tragedy of the Commons
Let us say that once a week, at your company, there is a fresh fruit bowl (welcome to the 21st century in a research facility…), and you love strawberries. Many other people also like strawberries and sometimes there are none left. This leads you to the idea that you could go sooner to the fruit bowl and take more strawberries with you. Unfortunately, others also have a similar idea. Soon, whoever is first at the fruit bowl, takes all the strawberries with them, leaving the others with… the rest *gasp*! This leads to turmoil within the company and management decides to stop serving strawberries. Basically a loose-loose situation.
Strawberries can be interchanged with other things. The most well known example includes a meadow and cows. If there are too many cows, the meadow will erode and the cows have to starve (except we have other meadows – then we can play this game till the last meadow is eroded and only then the cows have to starve). In both examples the outcome is the same: if you over-exploit a resource, for the long run, no-one wins.
Of course there are different options how we can avoid erosion:
- Education and Exhort: People must understand what is going on. If they simply have no idea what they are doing, how are they supposed to know when to stop? Additionally, societal pressure can do wonders! I mean why else would you compare yourself to your neighbours, friends, and people on social media? 😉
- Privatization: Not the sort of privatization you are thinking about! Split up the resource equally and let the consequences of use speak for themselves.
- Regularization: Let the resource be controlled. Depending on the resource different approaches can be taken: bans, quotas, permits, taxes, etc.
Drift to Low Performance
This trap is the manifestation of the downward spiral. One bias and a heuristic come into play here:
- Negativity Bias: being more fixed on bad than good news
- Availability Heuristic: current events are felt more common than they actually are
The combination of both can play out like the following: You want to eat more healthy and decide to quit sugar. This goes well for a couple of days, and suddenly you have this intense craving. So you slip and eat some ice cream. The next day you feel bad about the slip. This drains your willpower and you slip again. Maybe even a bit more which leads you to eating a bit more ice cream than yesterday; which makes you feel bad even more. This slippery slope can go on and on till you are obese and have some serious health issues (and even beyond…).
The issue with the combination of the bias and heuristic is that you do not do a deep dive into ice cream abuse. It is a slow and steady decline and in the end you ask yourself: “How did I end up like this?“.
There are two ways of stopping the downward spiral:
- keeping performance standards absolute and/or
- enhance the standard by the best performance
My tip for the first option: make it humanely possible! A day only has 24 hours and the human body (brain included) only has so much capacity. If your goals are too high, the downward spiral is right there, waiting for you…
The second option allows you to steadily improve yourself and track your progress, keeping the chain running.
Escalation
Do you know why auctions are so extremely profitable? By competing with one or more people, it is very likely that the final bit exceeds the actual value of the contested object. This happens because the nature of the bidding is no longer about the object. We simply want to win!
Auctions are not the only place where you can see escalation in action. May it be a feud, a college competing for rich students (a lazy river – seriously?!?), or technological advancement. Per se, all the examples, except the feud, are not inherently bad. Healthy competition keeps the world improving. The excess, on the other hand (overpaying, skyrocketing student loans, and exploitation of workers), is.
The easy way out would be to simply stop. I know, not the most fun thing. The other option would be a disarmament agreement. Get together and work it out. Both options are (usually) better than the final one: let it get worked out by another party.
Shifting the Burden to the Intervenor – Addiction
Addiction is problematic. Addiction creates an unhealthy dependency. Addiction can have many forms. Well known addictions, among others, are: alcohol, social media, tobacco, video games, and sugar. Another form of addiction is codependency. When you are incapable of solving a problem without the help of another person and/or institute.
The underlying problem with codependency is that we are losing the ability to solve our problems ourselves. An infamous example would be an overprotected child. Dependent on its parents, to solve any problem, because it never learned and/or forgot how to. Of course the words “child” and “parents” can be swapped by other words. “Company” and “grands”, “self-worth” and “relationship”, etc.
Unfortunately, the way out of an addiction is hard: stop using/doing it. If you can, go cold turkey. If you cannot, slowly decrease the dependency. Learn to solve the problem on your own.
Rule Beating
When you follow a rule to the letter and avoid the real sense of the rule. An example would be speeding. As long as the police is nowhere to be seen, you drive as fast as you want to. And the rule is the holiest thing in the universe if the police is close by.
This behaviour is commonly a response to “overrigid, deleterious, unworkable or ill-defined rules.” [1]. The solution is to learn from the feedback. If your product is used for something undesirable, learn why your users do it, and solve the issue in an user centered approach.
Seeking the Wrong Goal
Defining a bad goal/frame is probably the most vicious trap of them all. The goal sets the direction you are working towards. The only thing that makes a bad goal worse, is the wrong measurement. If you want to create the best app in the world and measure this by the amount of money put into the development, you will end up with the most expensive and probably the least efficient app in the world (I’m exaggerating here because someone may have experienced something similar…). The world usually tends to optimize for that one measurement: Grades, Income, Likes, etc. Regardless of whether it is the right measurement or not.
It is easy to use the first goal and measurement that pops up in your mind. It is harder to really think about the goal, understanding the issue, and then determining a measurement that really helps you to achieve it.
Conclusion
In this post we talked about different System Traps one should look out for. The two most important key takeaways are:
- Understand the underlying issue
- Implement a feedback system
By understanding the real issue you are able to come up with solutions which are of long-term nature. The feedback helps you with that. It allows you to break out of a repetitive circle. The best solution is not always the most obvious one; Therefore, feedback will allow you to understand the direction you are heading at and whether you want to change the course.
The End 😉
If you liked this post, didn’t like it, and/or have a book recommendation, please leave a comment, subscribe to the blog, and share this post. I am always happy to learn new things and improve myself.
[1] ADDITIONAL DISCLAIMER: In this post I heavily use materials from the book “Thinking in Systems: A Primer” by Donealla H. Meadows.