Cobra Killer
A good strategic partner helps you plan. But a great strategic partner does more.
They help you second-guess the unexpected, the unintended... and the - hold on: how did that thing get in here, and how do we kill it before it kills us?
I sincerely apologise for the interruption. Let’s rewind a little.
The year is 1926. The place is Delhi. The weather is... hot. A RUSTLING NOISE is heard in the bushes. It is a DEADLY COBRA. There are COBRAS simply EVERYWHERE. Why this foul plague of serpents, dammit? Those things are DANGEROUS. Something MUST BE DONE.
In the early years of the 20th century, concerned by the increasing number of venomous cobras, the British Imperial government of Delhi decided to fix the problem, once and for all.
They therefore offered a small reward for every cobra skin brought into police garrisons around the city. The plan - simple enough - worked well at first. Large numbers of snakes were caught and killed by snake-catchers, in return for the official bounty. Then things started to unravel. The snake-catchers realised that they could simply breed more cobras in order to collect more rewards.
Which of course, they did. A suspiciously large number of cobras were soon being redeemed for cash. Realising that the plan was not going according to plan, the British suspended what was now in effect a massive, government-sponsored cobra-breeding operation. The once-thriving cobra economy collapsed overnight. So it was that a large number of freshly-minted and now completely-worthless cobras were allowed to slink off into the wild, there to breed. With the net result that even more venomous cobras were in circulation after the plan than before the plan. Oh.
So what did we just learn?
That second-order effects matter? Yes. That corner-cases occur? Yes. That perverse incentives exist? That plans do not happen in a void, but in a competitive ecosystem?
Yes again... but, that’s not all. For the definitive take, we turn to British cyberneticist and friendly wizard Stafford Beer, and his famous dictum of 1974: the purpose of a system is what it does.
What Beer teaches us is that the system does what it does - in a way that is neither good, bad, clever or stupid - it’s just whirring away, irrespective of whatever you may have originally intended. And while the system may be defined in static terms, the world cannot be so neatly specified. Moreover, the slightly-modified world with your big idea running is not the same world as it was without it. That’s why the future is so notoriously difficult to predict.
So, from the perspective of the British officers, a well-intended scheme failed. But from the perspective of the snake catchers, it went magnificently. The cobras were not altogether unhappy either. For everyone else, though, more snakes about the place was an unambiguously Bad Thing. The fact that the system was later said to have ‘unintended consequences’ means in Beer’s terms that the designers simply did not understand what would happen if it worked exactly as designed: which is what all systems do.
“The purpose of a system is what it does. ”
It’s easy to assume that you, a smart person, wouldn’t make this kind of mistake. But good strategic thinking is hard. And thinking about thinking - working out what’s going to happen when outputs are plugged into inputs - is harder still. And remember: we haven’t even switched the machine on yet.
But here at Liminal we apply exactly this process, because we must. And we must, because the kind of systems we typically work with - where unpredictable human beings meet technical barriers, where the individual meets the group, and where the future meets the present - are usually (if not always) highly looped and unruly things. With fangs.
Now then: wanna buy a cobra?
LINKS
Horst Siebert, Der Kobra- Effekt: Wie man Irrwege der Wirtschaftspolitik vermeidet (2001)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kobra-Effekt-Irrwege-Wirtschaftspolitik-vermeidet/dp/3421055629
Stafford Beer, The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
Cash for Ash (2018)
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre (1902)
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-1902
