on January 20th that the virus was spreading rapidly from person‐to‐person. Three days later, Wuhan went into lockdown. Aggressive action earlier in January had been the world's best chance to avert a pandemic. Now it was too late. Scattered cases of Covid‐19 were showing up across China and around the globe. Some of those infections arrived with the almost 400,000 travelers, including thousands from Wuhan, who flew from China to the United States in January (Eder, Fountain, Keller, Xiao, and Stevenson, 2020). Thousands more carried the virus to Europe, where outbreaks soon became devastating. From Europe, the virus traveled to the U.S East Coast, triggering massive outbreaks.
China had missed the first and best chance to stop the pandemic in its tracks. The failure was catastrophic; the cover‐up criminal. But the cause of the cover‐up was dismayingly ordinary. Regardless of country or sector, leaders routinely try to protect themselves and their organization by suppressing problems in the hope of fixing them before anyone notices (Lee, 1993; Gallos and Bolman, 2021). Officials in Wuhan accordingly unleashed a global disaster while trying to avoid local embarrassment. They failed to anticipate that their decisions would be catastrophic for themselves, their constituents, and the globe. But once the disease was off and running, the responsibility for battling this illness fell to leaders in other nations.
A few who were well‐prepared saw the challenge and moved quickly to devise and launch smart and effective containment strategies. Most leaders were unprepared and misjudged the challenge. They failed to grasp the dynamics of exponential curves, waited for things to get bad, and then tried to play catch‐up. Was this a black swan that no one could have predicted? In fact, some countries expected it and were prepared, including many of those closest to China. A year into the pandemic, the U.S. infection rate ran more than 2,000 times higher than Taiwan's, and more than 4,000 times higher than Vietnam's. Vietnam shares a 900‐mile border with China. Taiwan, an island state, is Chinese in language and culture and only 81 miles offshore from China. Taiwan and Vietnam had both been scarred in the past by epidemics originating in China, and both had established epidemic control centers that swung into action at the first word of a new viral illness (Fulton, 2020; Piper, 2020; Shapiro, 2020). On December 31, 2019, the same day that China first announced the existence of a new virus, Taiwan officials started boarding planes to test passengers arriving from Wuhan. In January, Taiwan and Vietnam both began testing for Covid‐19, quarantined anyone who tested positive, and did contact tracing. Both countries implemented mask mandates and quarantined travelers from places where Covid‐19 had been identified (Chung, 2020). A combination of experience, expertise, and infrastructure spawned aggressive strategies that helped both countries maintain very low rates of Covid‐19 infections and deaths.
Events like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Covid‐19 make bold headlines, but less dramatic errors and failures happen every day. Most don't make front‐page news, but they are very familiar to people who work in today's organizations. In the remainder of this chapter, we discuss how organizational complexity intersects with fallacies of human thinking to obscure what's really going on and leads us astray. We spell out some of the peculiarities of organizations that make them so difficult to decode and manage. Finally, we explore how our deeply held and well‐guarded mental models cause us to fail—and, most important, how to avoid becoming ensnared in that trap.
COMMON FALLACIES IN EXPLAININGORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEMS
Albert Einstein once said that a thing should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. When we ask students and managers to analyze cases like the Covid‐19 pandemic, they often make things simpler than they really are. They do this by relying on one of three misleading and distorted explanations.
The first and most common is blaming people. This approach casts every failure as a product of individual blunders. Problems result from egotism, bad attitudes, abrasive personalities, neurotic tendencies, stupidity, or incompetence. It's too easy as a way to explain anything that goes wrong. After every catastrophe, the hunt is on for someone to blame. As children, we learned it was important to assign blame for every broken toy, stained carpet, or wounded sibling. Pinpointing the culprit is comforting. Assigning blame resolves ambiguity, explains mystery, and makes it obvious what to do next: punish the guilty. Disasters and scandals often have their share of culpable individuals, who may suffer public ignominy, lose their jobs or, in extreme cases, go to jail or lose their lives. But there is almost always a larger and more important story about the organizational and social context that sets the stage for individual malfeasance. In China, as in other authoritarian regimes, for example, corruption is an inevitable product of a system that protects the powerful from scrutiny. The only fundamental solution is changing the system, but that is not what the rulers want. So they try to appease the populace by throwing the book at occasional unlucky offenders, while the corruption continues and deepens. Targeting individuals while ignoring larger system failures oversimplifies the problem and does little to prevent its recurrence.
Greatest Hits from Organization Studies
Hit Number 8: James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958)
March and Simon's pioneering 1958 book Organizations sought to define an emerging field by offering a structure and language for studying organizations. It was part of the body of work that helped Simon earn the 1978 Nobel Prize for economics.
March and Simon offered a cognitive, social‐psychological view of organizational behavior, with an emphasis on thinking, information processing, and decision making. The book begins with a model of behavior that presents humans as continually seeking to satisfy motives based on their aspirations. Aspirations at any given time are a function of individuals' history and environment. When aspirations are unsatisfied, people search until they find better options. Organizations influence individuals primarily by managing the information and options, or “decision premises,” that they consider.
March and Simon followed Simon's earlier work (1947) in critiquing the economic view of “rational man,” who maximizes utility by considering all available options and choosing the best. Instead, they argue that both individuals and organizations have limited information and limited capacity to process what they do have. They never know all the options. Instead, they gradually alter their aspirations as they search for alternatives. Home buyers often start with a dream house in mind, but gradually adapt to the realities of what's available and what they can afford. Instead of looking for the best option—“maximizing”––individuals and organizations instead “satisfice,” choosing the first option that seems good enough.
Organizational decision making is additionally complicated because the environment is complex. Resources (time, attention, money, and so on) are scarce, and conflict among individuals and groups is constant. Organizational design happens through piecemeal bargaining that holds no guarantee of optimal rationality. Organizations simplify the environment to reduce the demands on limited information‐processing and decision‐making capacities. They simplify by developing “programs”—standardized routines for performing repetitive tasks. Once a program is in place, the incentive is to stay with it as long as the results are marginally satisfactory. Otherwise, the organization is forced to expend time and energy to innovate. Routine tends to drive out innovation because individuals find it easier and less taxing to stick to programmed tasks (which are automatic, well‐practiced, and more certain of success). Thus, a student facing a term‐paper deadline may find it easier to “fritter”—make tea, straighten the desk, text friends, or browse the Web—than write a good opening paragraph. Managers may find it easier to sacrifice quality than change a familiar routine.
March and Simon's book falls primarily within the structural and human resource views. But their discussions of scarce resources, power, conflict, and bargaining recognize the reality of organizational politics. They emphasize framing, even though they do not use the word. Decision making, they argue, is always based on a simplified model of the world. Organizations develop unique vocabulary and classification schemes, which determine
