Three Steps Ahead: Thinking Strategically to Avoid Unintended Consequences (Connect the Dots) by David Silverstein

Author:David Silverstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Breakthrough Performance Press
Published: 2015-05-06T14:00:00+00:00

For example, when the British ruled India, they were alarmed by the number of poisonous snakes in Delhi. The government decided to offer a reward to anyone who brought in a dead cobra. Offering a bounty seemed like an efficient way to get rid of snakes without having to hire government workers to do the task.

At first, the policy worked well, but then enterprising people realized they could breed cobras, kill them, and bring them in for a reward. When the government realized what was happening, it ended the reward system. But when the program ended, the cobra farmers simply released their snakes, creating a net increase in the number of poisonous snakes. This “cobra effect” has happened again and again when bounties have been offered as a way to eliminate pests, including rats in Hanoi, Vietnam, and feral pigs in Fort Benning, Ga., as Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt, authors of Freakonomics, document.49

When the British created their bounty for dead cobras, they assumed people would only choose between avoiding cobras versus catching and killing cobras. Given just those two choices, the bounty seemed like a great way to motivate people to catch cobras. That’s what the British wanted, and they clearly did create a positive reward system for those who went out and caught cobras. What the British didn’t expect was that people had a clever third choice.

Companies aren’t immune to the cobra effect. When an Internet company offered a reward to its programmers for finding bugs in the software, it learned that some programmers were adding bugs in order to “find” them later and collect the reward. Thinking an additional step ahead allowed the company to outsmart those who had outsmarted the system. The company changed its policy and started giving programmers a bonus when no bug was found in code they had written, and it started paying a bounty to any customer who found a bug.50

Cat and Mouse: Which Will You Be?

We don’t think about the alternative choices that others have because we’re often too focused on assuming they will do what we want, or expect, them to do. A study of chess players found that one factor that distinguishes grandmasters from other chess players is that although the lesser-ranked players think many moves ahead, they tend to assume that their opponents will play the pattern they expect they will. Grandmasters, in contrast, look for ways the opponent might wreck their intended plan.51

Unintended consequences aren’t usually the immediate outcome of a change but a series of unexpected outcomes. Therefore, anticipating unintended consequences means thinking ahead. You must be creative to imagine those things that haven’t happened, may never happen, or that no one else has even considered.

The next section will give you the tools to think several moves ahead: using stories and narratives, scenario planning, systems thinking, and creativity to out-think your competition.

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