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with complex systems, and as such, we should expect reactions and consequences beyond the immediate scope of our work.

The cobra effect occurs when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse.

A bounty on cobras was declared: Bring in a dead cobra, get some cash. “And he expected this would solve the problem,” said Vikas Mehrotra, a finance professor, on the Freakonomics podcast.25 “But the population in Delhi, at least some of it, responded by farming cobras.

the open space would encourage face-to-face collaboration, but it backfired.

F2F interactions plunged by about 70% in both companies. Meanwhile, email and messaging activity spiked. When people were placed closer together so that they’d talk more, they talked less.

On one hand, you think: Of course, moving people closer together will lead them to collaborate more! That’s just basic sociology. On the other hand: No, look at subways or airplanes—when people are crammed in together, they find ways to retain some privacy through headphones or books or deeply unwelcoming glances.

“Get your model out there where it can be shot at. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own …. The thing to do, when you don’t know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment—or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error.”

we don’t succeed by foreseeing the future accurately. We succeed by ensuring that we’ll have the feedback we need to navigate.

Feedback loops spur improvement. And where those loops are missing, they can be created.

as Michael Jordan said, “You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way.”

the people who dominated the conversation tended to be the complainers and the critics.

They had a facilitator run the meetings, using a new structured agenda that included a segment in which every participant shared something positive from the previous week.

Beyond the structured agenda, though, they added a feedback loop. At the end of every meeting, every attendee verbally scored the meeting from 1 to 5. Outliers were asked quickly what had made the meeting unusually helpful or unhelpful. When people complained about something—a discussion going on too long, a problem not being resolved—those issues got addressed.

Can we create closed feedback loops so that we can improve quickly? Is it easy to reverse or undo our intervention if it turns out we’ve unwittingly done harm?

“per use” effects of different bags on climate change and concluded that you’d need to use a paper bag 3 times and a cotton reusable bag 131 times to be on par with plastic bags.

“Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.

We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them

“In public health, if you do your job, they cut your budget, because no one is getting sick,”

Preventive efforts succeed when nothing happens. Who will pay for what does not happen?

Where are there costly problems? Who is in the best position to prevent those problems? And, how do you create incentives for them to do so?