One thing that has been on my mind a lot recently is systems theory and how systems behave as change happens. This took me back to this post from one of my courses from my masters program; it generated a good deal of discussion including other examples from my classmates.
Early in my career, I found myself in the middle of a fascinating situation that gave me a real-life lesson on systems theory. I was working as a consultant, responsible for the technology supporting a cold-roll steel producer’s manufacturing control system. Now, putting together this system was a marathon, not a sprint, and involved a ton of back and forth between management and the union.
One important part of the deal was that the workers would get a bit of extra cash for completing specific tasks on top of their hourly rate. Management thought that by rewarding certain tasks – like finishing a coil or performing maintenance – the workers would be motivated to be more productive. Basically, it was the idea that if you reward certain actions, you’ll get certain outcomes. But here’s where things got complicated – or as Conrad & Poole would put it in 2012, this was where we saw that “Cause-Effect relationships in systems are complex”.
The unique thing about my job was that I was kinda caught between the management and the union. This meant I got to hang out on the shop floor and chat with the folks who were actually rolling the steel. Although skeptical at first - I did wear a tie after all - they eventually would talk and interact with me. They were proud of their work and liked to talk about it. I learned quite about about steel from them – everything from the ins and outs of plating lines and mills to the difference between normalization and annealing. As an aside, other than the odd trivia night question this knowledge has been of dubious usefulness.
One pattern I noticed was that the workers who’d been around the longest were usually driving tow-motors or operating cranes. When I asked about this, they told me it was simple: they got paid extra for each coil they moved. That’s why you’d see them, at the end of the day, scrambling around and moving coils back and forth, all while diligently logging each move on their handhelds. Even though the management knew about this “coils carousel”, they couldn’t do anything about it until the next contract negotiations rolled around.
This situation reminded me of something called the Cobra Effect or the Perverse Effect Rule. You might be wondering what snakes and steelworkers have in common. Well, during British Rule in India, the government paid folks for each cobra they killed. Seeing an opportunity, people started breeding cobras just to collect the bounty (Newell & Doll, 2015). Something similar happened with rats during the French occupation of Hanoi (Vann, 2003). These examples show how systems can be complex and sometimes lead to outcomes that nobody planned for.
References:
Conrad, C. R., & Poole, M. S. (2012). Keys to Strategic Organizational Communication. In Strategic organizational communication in a global economy (pp. 30–69). essay, Wiley-Blackwell.
Newell, B. & Doll, C. (2015, September 16). Systems Thinking and the Cobra Effect. Our World. https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/systems-thinking-and-the-cobra-effect.
Vann, M. G. (2003). Of rats, rice, and race: The great hanoi rat massacre, an episode in french colonial history. French Colonial History, 4, 191-203.