followed? The answer takes us to a very familiar story of leadership and life in organizations. Around the world managers and officials look up the chain of command for signals about what they are and aren't supposed to do. They often believe that keeping bosses happy is one of the surest routes to survival and success. Nowhere is this truer than in China, where leaders in every organization answer to the Communist Party, which has created the world's most sweeping system for suppressing news or opinions that could make the government or the Party look bad. That's why local officials in Guangdong had tried to cover up the SARS outbreak in 2003. Seventeen years later, officials in Wuhan followed the same playbook (Cook, 2020). A twenty‐first‐century reporting system fell victim to ancient human impulses. Instead of being recognized for her diligence, Dr. Ai was reprimanded “harshly” by her hospital for not following the unspoken rules (Chheda, 2020; Kuo, 2020).
Despite the cover‐up, online reports were quickly leaked. The news reached Beijing, setting off alarm bells. On December 31, China's National Health Commission ordered Wuhan to make a public announcement about the new illness and to inform the World Health Organization that China was seeing a cluster of suspicious pneumonia cases. That was when the world first heard about the new virus, but the information was spotty and only a few infectious disease experts immediately recognized the risk of a pandemic. Meanwhile, disease control specialists from Beijing raced to Wuhan. There they were greeted with warm welcomes and reassurance that the new illness was nothing to worry about—not much different from seasonal influenza.
Privately, however, Wuhan officials scrambled to hide a grimmer reality (Myers, 2020). Local police rounded up eight doctors on January 1, sending a clear message to the local medical community to stay silent. When one of them, Li Wenliang, died from Covid‐19 a few weeks later, the Chinese public made him a posthumous hero rather than a luckless victim (Buckley, 2020).
For a few critical weeks in January, Wuhan officials continued to suppress the case count, instructing doctors not to report cases without official clearance (Myer, 2020; Shih, Rauhala, and Sun, 2020). Officials apparently hoped to get the new illness under control and make it slither away. But events were racing beyond their control, dooming any efforts to keep the lid on. Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, is a major air and rail hub, and travelers were already beginning to carry the new disease well beyond its birthplace.
After trying to minimize the seriousness of the outbreak, Chinese doctors confirmed on January 20th that the virus was spreading rapidly from person‐to‐person. Three days later, Wuhan went into lockdown. Aggressive action earlier in January had been the world's best chance to avert a pandemic. Now it was too late. Scattered cases of Covid‐19 were showing up across China and around the globe. Some of those infections arrived with the almost 400,000 travelers, including thousands from Wuhan, who flew from China to the United States in January (Eder, Fountain, Keller, Xiao, and Stevenson, 2020). Thousands more carried the virus to Europe, where outbreaks soon became devastating. From Europe, the virus traveled to the U.S East Coast, triggering massive outbreaks.
China had missed the first and best chance to stop the pandemic in its tracks. The failure was catastrophic; the cover‐up criminal. But the cause of the cover‐up was dismayingly ordinary. Regardless of country or sector, leaders routinely try to protect themselves and their organization by suppressing problems in the hope of fixing them before anyone notices (Lee, 1993; Gallos and Bolman, 2021). Officials in Wuhan accordingly unleashed a global disaster while trying to avoid local embarrassment. They failed to anticipate that their decisions would be catastrophic for themselves, their constituents, and the globe. But once the disease was off and running, the responsibility for battling this illness fell to leaders in other nations.
A few who were well‐prepared saw the challenge and moved quickly to devise and launch smart and effective containment strategies. Most leaders were unprepared and misjudged the challenge. They failed to grasp the dynamics of exponential curves, waited for things to get bad, and then tried to play catch‐up. Was this a black swan that no one could have predicted? In fact, some countries expected it and were prepared, including many of those closest to China. A year into the pandemic, the U.S. infection rate ran more than 2,000 times higher than Taiwan's, and more than 4,000 times higher than Vietnam's. Vietnam shares a 900‐mile border with China. Taiwan, an island state, is Chinese in language and culture and only 81 miles offshore from China. Taiwan and Vietnam had both been scarred in the past by epidemics originating in China, and both had established epidemic control centers that swung into action at the first word of a new viral illness (Fulton, 2020; Piper, 2020; Shapiro, 2020). On December 31, 2019, the same day that China first announced the existence of a new virus, Taiwan officials started boarding planes to test passengers arriving from Wuhan. In January, Taiwan and Vietnam both began testing for Covid‐19, quarantined anyone who tested positive, and did contact tracing. Both countries implemented mask mandates and quarantined travelers from places where Covid‐19 had been identified (Chung, 2020). A combination of experience, expertise, and infrastructure spawned aggressive strategies that helped both countries maintain very low rates of Covid‐19 infections and deaths.
Events like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Covid‐19 make bold headlines, but less dramatic errors and failures happen every day. Most don't make front‐page news, but they are very familiar to people who work in today's organizations. In the remainder of this chapter, we discuss how organizational complexity intersects with fallacies of human thinking to obscure what's really going on and leads us astray. We spell out some of the peculiarities of organizations that make them so difficult to decode and manage. Finally, we explore how our deeply held and well‐guarded mental models cause us to fail—and, most important, how to avoid becoming ensnared in that trap.
COMMON FALLACIES IN EXPLAININGORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEMS
Albert Einstein once said that a thing should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. When we ask students and managers to analyze cases like the Covid‐19 pandemic, they often make things simpler than they really are. They do this by relying on one of three misleading and distorted explanations.
The first and most common is blaming people. This approach casts every failure as a product of individual blunders. Problems result from egotism, bad attitudes, abrasive personalities, neurotic tendencies, stupidity, or incompetence. It's too easy as a way to explain anything that goes wrong. After every catastrophe, the hunt is on for someone to blame. As children, we learned it was important to assign blame for every broken toy, stained carpet, or wounded sibling. Pinpointing the culprit is comforting. Assigning blame resolves ambiguity, explains mystery, and makes it obvious what to do next: punish the guilty. Disasters and scandals often have their share of culpable individuals, who may suffer public ignominy, lose their jobs or, in extreme cases, go to jail or lose their lives. But there is almost always a larger and more important story about the organizational and social context that sets the stage for individual malfeasance. In China, as in other authoritarian regimes, for example, corruption is an inevitable product of a system that protects the powerful from scrutiny. The only fundamental solution is changing the system, but that is not what the rulers want. So they try to appease the populace by throwing the book at occasional unlucky offenders, while the corruption continues and deepens. Targeting individuals while ignoring larger system failures oversimplifies the problem and does little to prevent its recurrence.
Greatest Hits from Organization Studies
Hit Number 8: James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958)
March and Simon's pioneering 1958 book Organizations sought to define an emerging field by offering a structure and language for studying organizations. It was part of the body of work that helped Simon earn the 1978 Nobel Prize for economics.
March and Simon offered a cognitive, social‐psychological view of organizational behavior, with an emphasis on thinking, information processing, and decision making. The book begins with a model of behavior that presents humans as continually seeking to satisfy motives based on their aspirations. Aspirations at any given time are a function of individuals' history and environment. When aspirations are unsatisfied, people search until they find better options. Organizations