Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 31

Albert Einstein once said that a thing should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. When we ask students and managers to analyze cases like the Covid‐19 pandemic, they often make things simpler than they really are. They do this by relying on one of three misleading and distorted explanations.

The first and most common is blaming people. This approach casts every failure as a product of individual blunders. Problems result from egotism, bad attitudes, abrasive personalities, neurotic tendencies, stupidity, or incompetence. It's too easy as a way to explain anything that goes wrong. After every catastrophe, the hunt is on for someone to blame. As children, we learned it was important to assign blame for every broken toy, stained carpet, or wounded sibling. Pinpointing the culprit is comforting. Assigning blame resolves ambiguity, explains mystery, and makes it obvious what to do next: punish the guilty. Disasters and scandals often have their share of culpable individuals, who may suffer public ignominy, lose their jobs or, in extreme cases, go to jail or lose their lives. But there is almost always a larger and more important story about the organizational and social context that sets the stage for individual malfeasance. In China, as in other authoritarian regimes, for example, corruption is an inevitable product of a system that protects the powerful from scrutiny. The only fundamental solution is changing the system, but that is not what the rulers want. So they try to appease the populace by throwing the book at occasional unlucky offenders, while the corruption continues and deepens. Targeting individuals while ignoring larger system failures oversimplifies the problem and does little to prevent its recurrence.