Tempo 2.0 - Chapter 3: Your company is a system and section 3.1: The Monty Hall Problem
To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately. — Dr. Russel Ackoff Companies and other organizations are systems. All systems have some properties in common. As you will soon see, these properties can be counter-intuitive. If we rely only on intuition, we will make the wrong decision, even when we have all the information we need to make better ones. The Monty Hall problem We are used to solve problems through analysis. To analyze means to split a problem into parts, and trying to understand the whole by understanding each part separately. The idea is that understanding the parts enables us to understand the whole. This way of viewing the world is called reductionism , and it has been the dominating way of viewing the world in Western culture for hundreds of years. Analysis is indeed a powerful tool, but it has limits. When we try to understand a system by examining its parts, we loose the full pictu