The Story of Systems: chapter I
Systems thinking. It’s so fashionable. Hands up if you’ve been to a meeting about systems where the coffee is served with jargon shortbread, and it’s word salad for lunch? Thought so.
In this short series of stories, we try to make systems a bit more relatable. A bit more useable. A bit more human…
Snakes vs Humans in 19th Century Delhi
One of our favourite, and transparently absurd, stories of how systems can outwit the best intentions to solve a problem, has to be the apocryphal fail of the British Raj to rid Delhi of poisonous Cobras in the nineteenth Century. So badly did doing the obvious thing go wrong, that it even has its own name: the Cobra effect. As we’ll see, it’s a good example of linear thinking in a non-linear (systems) world.
The story begins with a problem in Delhi: too many poisonous Cobras for comfort for the British Raj.
In a linear world where A leads to B which leads to C, this looks like a simple problem to solve. Too many Cobras? Kill Cobras. Simple.
So, the Assistant Commissioner in Delhi orders a bounty of a generous number of rupees for every dead Cobra brought to the administration. At the beginning, it goes really well unless you’re a snake: lots of dead Cobras; lots of healthy pay-outs for Cobra hunters. But even when the number of Cobras seems a lot lower than usual (fewer bites, fewer deaths), the level of pay-outs keep rising. It’s getting pretty expensive now and the Assistant Commissioner is perplexed.
After a bit of investigating, the British discover that what they had actually done was sponsor some innovation: Cobra breeding (!) seemingly in every street in Delhi. In the linear world of the Raj, the solution to that new problem seemed as simple as offering a bounty: stop offering a bounty.
That was their next big mistake. What is the rational choice of Cobra-breeders when the bottom drops out of the Cobra market? Simple: release all the snakes! Delhi ended up with more Cobras than it started with. More bites. More deaths.
An apocryphal tale, for sure. But it seems the world is littered with linear thinking in a non-linear world; when you start looking. It seems we’ve always been in need of systems thinking…
Police vs Guns in California
In 2008 (as if to demonstrate that linear thinking in a non-linear world is a modern problem as much as an historical one) the police department in Oakland, California, introduced a gun amnesty with an enterprising economic twist: they paid $250 for each gun handed in. The objective, of course, was to reduce criminals’ access to firearms by tempting people to hand over lots of guns.
If only there were a Cobra effect alarm!
The first two people in the queue at one of the three amnesty locations were gun dealers with 60 firearms in the boot of their cars. They’d just leaned-into market forces and bought dozens of guns from seniors living in assisted-living accommodation.
Even beyond the absurdity of liberating weapons from the no-threat seniors it turned out that, rather than reducing the firearm hazard, some people were trading-up: turning in their cheap weapons and using the $250 to buy an upgraded gun.
The Oakland police department stopped the amnesty when they reached $170,000 in debt, because they were overwhelmed by the numbers.
Politicians vs Cars in Bogota
Back in 1998, the capital city of Columbia was, like many capital cities, gridlocked with traffic and choked with the air pollution from too many journeys in too many dirty cars. Linear thinking caps on… the proposed solution was to reduce the number of cars on the roads of Bogota by legislating to allow people to drive only on certain days of the week. It was an idea that had been tried before: in Chile in the late 1980’s and in Mexico City in the early 1990’s (after it earned the dubious United Nations honour of most polluted city in the world by some margin).
To make it simple to remember, you were barred from driving into the city on even-numbered days of the month if your number plate ended with an even number, and barred from odd-numbered days if your plate ended with an odd number. Simple.
But the non-linear world of complex systems has no time for simple.
The law-abiding citizens of Bogota still wanted to get to work and school and every other thing they needed to do every day. So they bought extra vehicles with odd or even number plates – whichever was the opposite of what they already had.
Guess what kind of additional vehicles made rational sense? The cheapest ones; which is practically a synonym for older, more polluting vehicles than the ones they weren’t allowed to drive that day.
And pollution went up.
Politicians 0. Complex systems 1.
