The model isn't a substitute for judgment

HARVARD | BUSINESS | SCHOOL 2009

According to BBC News:

A Swedish couple in search of the isle of Capri drove to Carpi, an industrial town in northern Italy, because they misspelt the name in their car's GPS.

And of course there's plenty of other examples,

• Giant lorries heading towards a town's main industrial plants are being directed by satellite navigation to the local crematorium instead (link)
• A 20-year-old student's car was wrecked by a train after she followed her sat nav system onto a railway track (link)
• Out-of-date satellite navigation systems are directing fans and players to Swansea's old football ground, the club has said (link)

It's tempting to dismiss these stories as human stupidity, but I think we've all made mistakes from relying too much on automated processes. But this reinforces a main part of the Case Method - that good managers should be careful not to rely too much to theoretical frameworks. The very ambiguity that students find discomforting is a deliberate attempt to replicate real life, and although mental models are presented they are not overpresented as they are in most programs. Indeed this is why there's such a volume of cases - there are no neat solutions or single way of solving a problem. Students are confronted with deceptively similar examples of actions that lead both to success and failure in different contexts. Utililse your model, but don't rely on it. Exercise reason by all means, but not at the expense of reason.

Comments

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