Series of small decisions can cumulatively lead to unwanted outcomes.
Kahn's 1966 term. Nobody chose to eliminate passenger rail or corner shops; each individual decision was small and reasonable, and the aggregate outcome was chosen by no one.
In practice
- A high street loses its butcher, then its baker, then its greengrocer, and every household that drove to the supermarket did something reasonable.
- A team that takes one urgent request a week has, within a year, no capacity for anything planned, and no meeting contained that decision.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Why reasoning works the way it does