Good engineers make terrible leaders
I think a pair of issues are being improperly conflated here with respect to the complexity of human systems. We see a similar problem contained within software engineering (and chemical engineering): most humans, including most engineers, are terrible at analysis and engineering of complex distributed systems. Human systems are just another example of this problem domain.<p>Systems level engineering breaks a problem-solving heuristic that people rely on to make analysis simple: that changing a variable does not feedback into the value of that variable, which allows you to break a big problem into a bunch of trivial small problems that can be solved independently. For systems level engineering problems, you have to consider the interaction of all components simultaneously, which is a very different type of analysis (you are designing for locally stable and hopefully approximately optimal systems level equilibria). It also has characteristics that go against the way humans want to design things: the general design pattern is that you can&#x27;t design for &quot;good&quot; outcomes per se, you can only design systems that mitigate &quot;bad&quot; outcomes, with optimal &quot;good&quot; outcomes being the natural result of efficient pathology minimization. Most people tend to design for the outcome they want, rather than minimizing the outcomes they don&#x27;t want, but only the latter works.<p>Bringing this back to human systems, in a naive analysis you can take any variable, label it &quot;good&quot;, and dial it up to eleven with some direct trivial changes. I almost always see it approached this way at a policy level. In a systems level analysis, it never works that way and you have less control of the tradeoffs than you might like as a matter of policy. We suck at human systems because, thus far, we haven&#x27;t come to terms with the reality that a systems level analysis doesn&#x27;t let you dictate the absolute values of &quot;good&quot; and &quot;bad&quot; no matter how you define them and controlling the relative values is far from trivial in a systems level analysis. We have tools for approaching this, as some types of engineering require it, but we don&#x27;t apply it because it doesn&#x27;t lend itself to the kind of naive analysis people understand and the tools don&#x27;t allow the kinds of outcomes in human systems we wish we could engineer.