Law #5: The Cure Can Be Worse Than The Disease

The disease is already bad. The cure makes it worse.

Extracted from The Fifth Discipline: Sometimes the easy or familiar solution is not only ineffective; sometimes it is addictive and dangerous. The long-term consequence of applying non-systemic solutions is an increased need for more of the solution. The phenomenon of short-term improvements leading to long-term dependency is so common, it has its own name among systems thinkers – it is called “Shifting the Burden”. Alcoholism is one instance.

Alcoholism may start as simple social drinking – a solution to the problem of low self-esteem or work-related stress. Gradually, the cure becomes worse than the disease. The tendency to slur on the speech and lose respect from their peers, lack coherence when presenting thoughts, a general tendency to lose one’s temper or slowdown in productivity. It therefore makes self-esteem and stress even worse than they were to begin with. The long-term, most insidious consequence of applying non-systemic solutions is the increased need for more and more of the solution.

Why does it happen? Why would we apply a cure and make the disease worse than it already is? In medical spheres, that would be called a misdiagnosis.

When does a misdiagnosis occur?

Did you say, when we did not understand the cause of the disease?

Exactly! It is the same with systemic issues. When we apply linear causal thinking to identifying solutions to what is inherently a systemic issue and therefore require a non-linear or a circular causal thinking approach, we are inherently misdiagnosing the issue.

Extracted from The Fifth Discipline: Shifting the Burden structures show that any long-term solution must, as Meadows says, “strengthen the ability of the system to shoulder its own burdens.” Sometimes, that is difficult; other times is surprisingly easy. A manager who has shifted the burden of his personnel problems onto a Human Resource Specialist may find that the hard part is deciding to take the burden back; but once that happens, learning how to handle people is mainly a matter of time and commitment.

However, when we say we don’t have time, we begin to run into Law #6.

Take a look at the Urgent File case study? What does it look like should we apply the understanding of this law to the case?

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