As for the reasons given:

1. Managers will always want control–that’s the point of their role.

2. This is backwards. More data may provide useful information, but by itself it cannot help anyone embrace the inherent complexity of the world. In fact, more data thrown at a struggling manager may induce more stress, and stress causes most people to throw nuance out the window. The new data will no doubt provide new avenues of actions, but only if they are consumed by mature managers. The data itself can’t raise anyone up.

3. I’m not sure what non-human decision making has to do with the reluctance of managers to take a more nuanced approach to their jobs. This has little to do with whether a manager is willing and able to think more complexly about his problems.

Where the author does make progress in explaining the trouble with embracing a complexity informed worldview is in this sentence: “The recognition of complexity is at its core a view of the world that that makes us more humble and more open.” This humility comes from seeing that you don’t and can’t know all the details. That’s a frightening proposition and hard to take in.

Russ Ackoff tried to answer the question of why managers never embraced systems thinking. He claimed two reasons. The first is the general reason that CYA is often a manager’s priority #1, so they tend to avoid new ways of approaching their problems, no matter how promising. The second reason, more specific to the topic of systems thinking, is that the profession of systems researchers is too introverted and hasn’t learned to speak clearly about its ideas. What it manages to impart to the interested manager is a vocabulary that may feel like knowledge, but is next to useless because it doesn’t help them understand the particular situation they are facing. It takes more than concept–it takes practice! What manager has the time or inclination to practice before work?

Thanks for the mindfood!

Readers might be interested to know that there is a way of doing a very simple version of the analysis presented by Aid Explorer, which I tried out in 2008 and described here: http://mande.co.uk/special-issues/participatory-aggregation-of-qualitative-information-paqi/#webpages It starts “Web pages are piles of links, brought together by website designers who think the links have some form of shared relevance. Links to other websites can be seen to be conceptually linked when they are referred to on the same webpage. A single Google search for two web page addresses will produce a list of sites where both are listed. See this example of a Google search for “www.dfid.goc.uk, http://www.worldbank.org“. The number of the sites containing both of these links tells us something about the relative strength of that conceptual link (i.e a lot of people see some form of commonality, though not necessarily the same form). ” The post goes on to describe the results of one systematic search for associated links, and includes a network diagram that shows the structure of associations