A unintended consequence pattern I’m watching that seems to determine which problems get attention and action: are they visible/simple or hidden/complex?
What is highly noticeable, and maybe in some sense bad, gets more blame than it deserves. But the bigger problems are unseen.
Further to this, people take actions on the noticeable things (or problems) when only one step is required to see an impact. People avoid other, perhaps more important, things that require multiple steps for there to be impact.
This is an evolving thought that I call “The Kudzu Effect” for some of the parallels to the vine’s history. Here are just a couple examples. I’ll return to this idea in the future.