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Showing posts from July, 2020

Why Do Smart Managers Make Bad Decisions?

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  What do racial injustice, pandemics, financial crises, globalisation, poverty, stock market, climate change, traffic, movement of billiard balls, swarming of birds, and your diet have in common?     Complexity .   Complexity lies beneath all natural, physical and human systems – as in ecology, biology, business, and economy. According to Peter Senge, complexity occurs where cause and effect are not close in time and space – like the lag time between a seed and a grown tree, injustice and revolt, eating and gaining weight. Unlike ‘complicated’, complexity is unpredictable (a car is complicated, traffic is complex) – as complexity arises from dynamic interactions of numerous variables encompassing, social, political, cultural, historical, and psychological domains. Biologist Lewis Thomas, observed “You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something y