Copying the visible form of a successful practice without the mechanism that made it work.
Feynman named it in 1974 from Pacific islanders who built runways and control towers from bamboo, having observed that these preceded cargo. The form was faithfully reproduced; the causation ran the other way.
In practice
- A firm copies a competitor's daily stand-up, quarterly objectives and open-plan office, and none of the reasons any of them worked.
- A school adopts the timetable of a high-performing academy and not its staffing ratio, then wonders why results do not move.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- Proverbs that recur across cultures