John Sterman, System dynamics Group Leader at MIT's Sloan School of Management, in his Business Dynamics (page 5 - 14) discusses policy resistance. Here are some revealing excerpts:
"And it will fallout as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore, you will provoke another; and that which removes the one ill symptom produces others... ---Sir Thomas More
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men/ Gang aft a-gley. ---Robert Burns
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. ---Murphy
We have met the enemy and he is us. ---Pogo
"From Thomas More in 1516 to Pogo in the mid 20th century it has long been acknowledged that people seeking to solve a problem often make it worse. Our policies may create unanticipated side effects. Our attempts to stabilize the system may destabilize it. Our decisions may provoke reactions by others seeking to restore the balance we upset. Forrester (1971) calls such phenomena the "counterintuitive behavior of social systems." These unexpected dynamics often lead to policy resistance, the tendency for interventions to be delayed, diluted, or defeated by the response of the system to the intervention itself (Meadows, 1982).
From "...the late biologist and essayist Lewis Thomas (1974, p. 90):
'When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you're dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope of helping. This realization is one of the sore discouragements of our century...You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obliged to understand...the whole system... Intervening is a way of causing trouble.'
"But how can one come to understand the whole system? How does policy resistance arise? How can we learn to avoid it, to find the high leverage policies that can produce sustainable benefit?"
"One cause of policy resistance is our tendency to interpret experience as a series of events, for example, 'inventory is too high,' or 'sales fell this month.' Accounts of who did what to whom are the most common mode of discourse, from the mailroom to the boardroom, from headlines to history books. We are taught from an early age that every event has a cause, which in turn is an effect of some still earlier cause: 'Inventory is too high because sales unexpectedly fell. Sales fell because the competitors lowered their price. The competitors lowered their price because...' Such even-level explanations can be extended indefinitely, in an unbroken Aristotelian chain of causes and effects, until we arrive at some Firs Cause, or more likely, lose interest along the way.
"The event oriented world view leads to an event-oriented approach to problem solving. Figure 1 shows how we often try to solve problems. We assess the state of affairs and compare it to our goals. The gap between the situation we desire and the situation we perceive defines our problem. For example suppose sales of your organization were $80 million last quarter, but your sales goal was $100 million. The problem is that sales are 20% less than you desired. You then consider various options to correct the problem. You might cut prices to stimulate demand and increase market share, replace the vice president of sales with someone more aggressive, or take other actions. You select the option you deem best and implement it, leading (you hope) to a better result. You might observe your sales increase: problem solved. Or so it seems.
"Figure 1 Event-oriented view of the world
"The system reacts to your solution: As your sales rise, competitors cut prices, and sales fall again. Yesterday's solution becomes today's problem. We are not puppet masters influencing a system out there -- we are embedded in the system. The puppet master's movements respond to the position of the marionette on the strings. There is feedback: The results of our actions define the situation we face in the future. The new situation alters our assessment of the problem and the decisions we take tomorrow (see the top of Figure 2).
"Policy resistance arises because we often do not understand the full range of feedbacks operating in the system (Figure 2). As our actions alter the state of the system, other people react to restore the balance we have upset. Our actions may also trigger side effects
Our decisions alter our environment, leading to new decisions,
but also triggering side effects, delayed reactions, changes in goals and interventions by others. These feedbacks may lead to unanticipated results and ineffective policies.
"Figure 2 The feedback view
"We frequently talk about side effects as if they were a feature of reality. Not so. In reality, there are no side effects, there are just effects. When we take action, there are various effects. The effects we thought of in advance, or were beneficial, we call the main, or intended effects. The effects we didn't anticipate, the effects which fed back to undercut our policy, the effects which harmed the system---these are the ones we claim to be side effects. Side effects are not a feature of reality but a sign that our understanding of the system is narrow and flawed.
"Unanticipated side effects arise because we too often act as if cause and effect were closely linked in time and space. But in complex systems such as an urban center or a hamster (or a business, society, or ecosystem) cause and effect are often distant in time and space. Narrow model boundaries often lead to beliefs that violate the laws of physics: in the mid 1990s California and the automobile industry debated the introduction of so-called zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) to reduce air pollution. True, the ZEVs ---electric cars---would have no tailpipe. But the power plants required to make the electricity to run them do generate pollution. In reality, California was promoting the adoption of DEVs---displaced emission vehicles---cars whose wastes would blow downwind to other states or accumulate in nuclear waste dumps outside its borders. Electric cars may turn out to be an environmental boon compared to internal combustion. The technology is improving rapidly, and air pollution is a major health problem in many cities. But no mode of transport or energy conversion process is free of environmental impact, and no legislature can repeal the second law of thermodynamics.
"To avoid policy resistance and find high leverage policies requires us to expand the boundaries of our mental models so that we become aware of and understand the implications of the feedbacks created by the decisions we make. That is, we must learn about the structure and dynamics of the increasingly complex systems in which we are embedded."
"Much of the art of system dynamics modeling is discovering and representing the feedback processes, which along with stock and flow structures, time delays, and nonlinearities, determine the dynamics of a system." In this way system dynamics can help us to avoid policy resistance.
Forrester, J. W. (1971) Counterintuitive behavior of social systems, Technology Review 73(3), 52-68. This paper is freely downloadable from Chapter 1 of Road Maps at http://sysdyn.mit.edu/road-maps/home.html (click on the table of contents to get to Chapter 1)
Meadows, Donella H. (1982) Whole earth models and systems, CoEvolution Quarterly, Summer 98-108.
Meadows, Donella H., J. Richardson, and G. Bruckmann (1982) Groping in the Dark. Chichester, England: John Wiley and Sons.
Sterman, John (2000) Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World. Irwin McGraw-Hill
Thomas, L. (1974) The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. New York: Viking Press.