Behavior Grows Better Before It Grows Worse

3. Behavior grows better before it grows worse.

Low-leverage interventions would be much less alluring if it were not for the fact that many actually work, in the short term. New houses get built. The unemployed are trained. Starving children are spared. Lagging orders turn upward. We stop smoking, relieve our child’s stress, and avoid a confrontation with a new coworker. Compensating feedback usually involves a “delay,” a time lag between the short-term benefit and the long-term disbenefit. The New Yorker once published a cartoon in which a man sitting in an armchair pushes over a giant domino encroaching upon him from the left. “At last, I can relax,” he’s obviously telling himself in the cartoon. Of course, he doesn’t see that the domino is toppling another domino, which in turn is about to topple another, and another, and that the chain of dominoes behind him will eventually circle around his chair and strike him from the right.

The “better before worse” response to many management interventions is what makes political decision making so counterproductive. By “political decision making,” I mean situations where factors other than the intrinsic merits of alternative courses of action weigh in making decisions—factors such as building one’s own power base, or “looking good,” or “pleasing the boss.” In complex human systems there are always many ways to make things look better in the short run. Only eventually does the compensating feedback come back to haunt you.

The key word is “eventually.” The delay in, for example, the circle of dominoes, explains why systemic problems are so hard to recognize. A typical solution feels wonderful, when it first cures the symptoms. Now there’s improvement; or maybe even the problem has gone away. It may be two, three, or four years before the problem returns, or some new, worse problem arrives. By that time, given how rapidly most people move from job to job, someone new is sitting in the chair.