visibility Archives - Unintended Consequences

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.

Continue reading “The Kudzu Effect”

Costs work differently depending on who pays and when they pay. These questions of “who” and “when” and innovations that change them are second-order effects that impact what society gets more or less of.

Some products come with only a cost of production, paid first by the producer and then pushed on to the purchasing customer. This is in spite of the products themselves creating external costs that greater society or specific individuals must bear later on. Other products have these external costs built in at the point of production. In either case, the type and severity of the costs can vary. These costs may be unseen to the product’s end customer, but it is the difference in cost type that changes behavior and leads to unintended consequences. Continue reading “Visibility of Cost”