To understand the financial crisis, view it as a systems accident.
Some say the root cause of the global financial crisis was a few regional financiers selling risky mortgages to poor people. How can that be? The subprime mortgage market is a fraction of the U.S. mortgage market, which is a fraction of the U.S. credit market, which is a fraction of the global credit market. How can defaults in a sub-sub-submarket destroy banks on two continents and send several countries to the brink of bankruptcy?
In his landmark analysis of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, sociologist Charles Perrow argued that that meltdown was not caused by any particular component or operator failure. Rather, it was caused by a number of small component failures that interacted in unpredicted ways. Those failures ranged from a pressure-relief valve that didn’t reseat properly to a meter that gave deceptive information to some perceptual errors by operators.
If a system has high interactive complexity, then by definition it is hard to predict the impact of a particular action on other elements within the system. If the system is tightly coupled, to use Perrow’s terminology, an action at one point propagates rapidly throughout.
2 Comments On: Innovating Our Way to a Meltdown
Peter – couldn’t agree more, and the benefits of systems thinking certainly hasn’t spread nearly far enough.
Loose coupling may be part of the solution, but I’d argue that building in greater resiliency and oversight of the sub-systems would go a long way to mitigate risks of failure as well.
Given the complexity of the financial industry, much greater transparency into the algorithms that firms base their risk models and automated trading behavior would do wonders as well.
And as you so aptly point out, regulators that are empowered to stop incredibly risky behavior QUICKLY is the likely set of teeth needed. Politics and scale of the problem means that this isn’t an easy fix either.
No system of sufficient size or complexity will have easy solutions – but most definitely agree that it will take multiple tactics to reign in the current damage to the world economics and mitigate further downside.
I think it’s an oversimplication to try to generalize about the kind of innovation and risk. Innovation is a broad concept and like other broad concepts such as leadership, creativity and even broad phsyical concepts like the internet or financial markets – all can be used for good or evil.
I believe that the application of a concept like innovation in a physical concept like financial markets could be potentially very different than say leadership or innovation applied in the world wide web.
Broad concepts like innovation and leadership are applied by human beings so the behavioral aspect introduced yet more complexity.
Each would need to be examined in light of all the complexity involved in the system at a given time.