OK, seriously, WHY didn't we see it coming?

"OK, enough! This tree has got to go!"

My comment in response to Paul Krugman's NY Times column today, "Lest We Forget".
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Your question is superb - How did those at the top not see this coming, or take it seriously, despite many stifled voices below pointing at it in alarm?

Yes, if financial things broke on this shoal, fix the financial things.

But, at the same time, this shoal has got to go, or it will just demolish the repair effort in a never-ending cycle of "How did that happen? Fix and forget."

This exact problem is well known and well documented by everyone, across industries, government agencies, auto companies, universities, etc. This process is ALSO broken, and needs to be addressed, by as many billion dollars as spent repairing the damage it caused.

Social decision making processes are no more abstract than financial markets, but get no respect, being in a higher leverage, further upstream, less visible place in the chain of events.

High-reliability human systems have been studied extensively, from Chernobyl to The Bay of Pigs to Challenger to aircraft cockpit teams to hospital surgical teams to the US Army Leadership Field Manual. The answer always comes down to the same thing -- dissenting views need to be heard, and dissenters need what Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson calls "Psychological Safety" or they will wilt and become ineffective. This is how humans always behave and unless steps are taken it always breaks along this fault line.

The right question then should be, who is going to take charge of seeing that those steps are taken and that level of social literacy achieved?

I can't emphasize enough how much more important this is than more math and science, in the absence of this. As T.S. Eliot said, we repeatedly get burned "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, but the man that is will shadow the man that pretends to be."

Much of my weblog is about what we really need to do to avoid such errors in judgment. I can only hope the right person wakes up and reads it and the links to sources such as MIT's papers or John Sterman's work on how poorly we can see systems that involve feedback.

"Why we have so much trouble seeing" (and what to do about it.)
http://newbricks.blogspot.com...

(photo by myself - "Fixed at last!" )