Intuitive Process Trap

The inituitive process trap occurs when a problem solver, who may be an individual or an organization, tries to apply the same intuitive, informal problem solving process they use on everyday problems (including problems at work) to a difficult problem. The unconscious assumption is that the same process will solve all problems. The result is symptomatic solutions that do not address the root cause.

Jay Forrester, inventor of the field of system dynamics, put it this way:

“Social systems are inherently insensitive to most policy changes that people select in an effort to alter behavior. In fact, a social system draws attention to the very points at which an attempt to intervene will fail. Human experience, which has been developed from contact with simple systems, leads us to look close to the symptoms of trouble for a cause. But when we look, we are misled because the social system presents us with an apparent cause that is plausible according to the lessons we have learned from simple systems, although this apparent cause is usually a coincident occurrence that, like the trouble symptom itself, is being produced by the feedback loop dynamics of a larger system.” (Source: World Dynamics, by Jay Forrester, 1971, page 95.)

This is probably the most common trap of them all in environmentalism, judging by the extreme lack of formal, highly refined processes tailored to the problem. For example, when was the last time you read a proposal that offered a solution to the sustainability problem, and backed up that assertion with a formal, highly refined problem solving process that fit the problem to a T, and an analysis driven by that process?

The alternative to the Intuitive Process Trap is an analytical approach.