This post is a paper I wrote for my Public Relations Measurement & Evaluation course at Syracuse University in the summer of 2013. This book review is of Dietrich Dörner’s “The Logic of Failure” published by Metropolitan Books .
During an airboat ride through the swamps of Louisiana, our tour guide told the ill-fated tale of the nutrias while pointing out these relatives of the beaver as they swam close to the banks. In the 1930s, the herbivores were introduced into the swamps by state wildlife agencies to control noxious weeds. With their voracious appetites and no natural predators in the swamps, however, the nutria has contributed significantly to coastal erosion, ravaging as much as 40 square miles of Louisiana coastland per year. Ecologists have even attributed part of Louisiana’s devastation by Hurricane Katrina to these destructive creatures eroding the state’s natural buffer against storms.
In introducing the nutrias, the state wildlife agencies exhibited the form of singular thinking that Dietrich Dörner, a German psychology professor, argues against in his book “The Logic of Failure.” Through experimentation, Dörner demonstrates how when individuals don’t take into consideration the many interrelated variables of situations, outcomes can be disastrous. Instead, to be successful, Dörner advocates for complex learning, or thinking about situations as an overall system composed of many interdependent variables and considering how those variables consistently interact with each other to create the system.
A Complex Learning Example
In Public Relations, applying complex learning can mean the difference between a successful campaign and a communications flop. When I worked in military public affairs, my office was once directed to develop a communications plan for a study the local city government and our engineering department had recently concluded. The study looked at how the local city and the military could jointly preserve land surrounding the base, ensuring a buffer was maintained for a crash zone around the installation. Without the maintenance of what is known as the clear zone, the base and city were concerned for the safety of the community outside the gates, as well as the potential of the base facing closure in the future if the mission of flying aircraft was negatively impacted.
After analyzing the study, partnering with the local city’s public information office, and researching who would be affected by the implications of the study, I developed a communications plan to increase awareness of the study with the goal of positioning the installation as a responsible community partner in maintaining the land. The plan was rolled out with a series of media interviews and public town halls.
Though the media coverage was balanced and the public town halls were able to provide information and answer questions, my communications plan did not anticipate backlash from a mobile home community near the clear zone that feared displacement. The plan did accomplish the objective of raising awareness in the surrounding community of the study, but, for at least one subset of a targeted audience, I failed to meet the goal of having the installation viewed as a responsible community partner.
Applying Complex Learning
My thinking for the communications plan violated concepts in complex learning Dörner lays out in the book, but as he says, “studying the consequences of our measures gives us excellent opportunities for correcting our incorrect behavioral tendencies and assumptions about reality.” To learn from my mistakes, let’s look at how complex learning could have been applied to the study’s communications plan and potentially prevented the backlash.
Lack of knowledge
The first violation of complex learning my communications plan thinking committed was a lack of what Dörner calls “structural knowledge,” how variables in a system are related and influence one another. The study was a complex situation with many variables, and I didn’t take into account how the mobile home residents’ proximity to, albeit not inside, the clear zone would affect their feelings toward the base.
As Dörner points out in the book, to save cognitive energy we many times use methodism, or the “unthinking application of a sequence of actions we have once learned.” The study’s communications plan treated the mobile home residents in the same manner as other communications plans for base activities that affected the external community, through public town hall meetings and media coverage. Due to the complexity of the study and as The Logic of Failure advocates, the plan should have looked at this situation individually and considered other communication methods, such as a door-to-door flyer distribution with information on what the state and federal governments provided for any displaced residents due to military actions or town hall meetings solely for the mobile home park.
Lack of supporting goals
In The Logic of Failure is a flow diagram to show the steps in the organization of a complex action. The first is formulating your goals, which Dörner says in complex situations you will neither have just one goal nor one part to a goal. The study communications plan’s goal was to position the base as a responsible community partner by achieving objectives to increase awareness about the study. What actually occurred, though the plan did increase awareness, was the replacement of one problem with another; a circle Dörner states occurs when contradictory relations exist between variables of the complex situation. As Dörner suggests, if my main goal was supported by more specific partial goals that had been visualized for clarification on what needed to be done, I may have been able to assure the mobile home residents that the city and the base would work with them fully in case of displacement, therefore lessening the negative impact overall to the study by their backlash.
Lack of defined planning
As with the Louisiana state wildlife agencies, the study communications plan did not “think through the consequences of certain actions.” Instead, I focused on efforts to solely raise awareness of the study so that targeted audiences would know the base was concerned with the safety of employees and community members, thereby acting responsibly. I did not think what other external factors to my objectives would be affected by the actions of the communications plan, such as possible displacement of residents.
Dörner writes that planning requires investigation into a problem looking for potential solutions, but since complex situations offer an indefinite amount of possible remedies, it is impossible to explore each one. Therefore, planning can be seen as a process to narrow the search to a certain sector of possible solutions and expanding that sector if a solution is not found within. There are many ways to narrow a search, such as developing a series of intermediate goals to explore solutions for those ends alone. When solutions fail to formulate in a sector, we can also expand the search through many methods, such as thinking in analogies to develop ideas toward solutions.
My planning for the study’s communications plan could have benefited from this narrowing and expanding of sectors to find a solution instead of automatically applying methodism. Through a more extensive search, I could have potentially found a solution to raise awareness about the study while also limiting unwanted backlash.
Dörner’s The Logic of Failure provides professionals in every field a fresh take on analyzing how we approach problems. Being aware of what singular thinking leads to and the benefits of complex learning, we can save ourselves unneeded headaches down the line.
What ways could you apply complex learning to your everyday business problems?
