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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5985183" data-attributes="member: 54877">You'd think that, but I find in practice (both personal and professional) that a majority of people who tend to default to process thinking tend to avoid analysis of the process itself when trouble arises. There are many significant exceptions, of course, given the wide variance in people, but the majority is as I have described.  Furthermore, this seems to have nothing to do with smarts, education, background, etc. I've known highly technical people, who are analytical in their jobs every day, very successful, who will blindly follow a side process even after it trips them up. I once worked for a company where over 10 engineers and technical management had blown $10,000 repeatedly over the same error, then wasted more trying for a foolproof technical fix. I mentioned that all we needed was that the backup on-call person (already there and needed for other purposes) simply needed to double-check the main on-call person's work, spending 5 minutes once a month. This would statistically reduce the chance of another failure to practically nil. They just stared at me. It had never even occurred to anyone before to question the process, through an 300%+ staff turnover in the six years this had been happening. (This was no great feather in my cap, either. It was a combination of having enough technical knowledge to know that a technical solution wouldn't work, but being new enough to the company to not be blinded by the established process. Any decent, technically qualified, business consultant would have spotted it, if asked.) My experience is that people are nearly always good judges of "this thing we are doing now is not working" but terrible at considering why. And like Scott Adams dictum that "we are all stupid, part of the time, about something," it can get anyone on a particular thing. We are creatures of habit. I'm certainly not immune in my own blindspots. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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