The source of poor policy: controlling learning drift and premature consensus in human organizations

As system dynamicists, we spend our days finding and patching up faulty pol icies, giving surprisingly little thought to the origin of these poor decis ion rules. And yet, if we understood their origin, we might be able to atta ck the problem of faulty policy at its source. This article presents a theo ry of policy formation that is consistent with what is known about evolutio nary processes and human psychology. The theory is translated into a comput er simulation model, which is used to illuminate several "handles" on polic y creation. The handles influence two potential failure modes in policy cre ation: (1) "learning drift", a process in which people learn unselectively and, hence, learn without improving: and/or (2) "premature consensus", a pr ocess in which managers agree on a policy before the "best" one has emerged , Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.