Skills and habits that serve well in one setting become blind spots in another, so training itself produces predictable failures.
Veblen coined the phrase, Burke developed it in Permanence and Change (1935), and Merton used it in 1940 in 'Bureaucratic Structure and Personality' to explain why officials trained to follow rules keep applying them where they no longer make sense. Burke's illustration was chickens trained to gather at a bell for food, which gathered at the same bell when it was rung for their slaughter.
In practice
- A compliance team trained to reject incomplete forms rejects an emergency request because one field is blank.
- An engineer asked to write for the public produces a specification.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is that training builds automatic responses, which fire whether or not the situation matches the one they were built for. Another is organisational: officials are rewarded for following rules, not for noticing when the rules misfire.
- In its favour
- A durable concept in the sociology of organisations, consistent with research on functional fixedness and the Einstellung effect.
- Against it
- It describes the problem without saying when expertise helps more than it hurts, and most of the time trained responses are right, which is why they are trained.
- Standing
- Compare the competency trap and the Einstellung effect.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline