Anti-Concepts

The state in which over-analysis or excessive deliberation prevents a decision or action from being taken. The pursuit of a perfect or fully certain...

The tendency to rely disproportionately on the first piece of information encountered when making decisions. Subsequent judgments are made by adjusting from the initial...

The dysfunctional meeting and decision pattern in which groups spend disproportionate time and energy on trivial, easy-to-discuss topics while giving inadequate attention to complex,...

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. This highlights the hidden costs of communication overhead and ramp-up time that accrue when...

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures. Using quantitative data for...

The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. Do not remove or change...

A perverse incentive is an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable result contrary to the intentions of its designers. The cobra effect occurs...

The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values, while discounting...

Organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structures. The architecture of any system — software, process, or organizational — will inevitably reflect the...

The practice of manipulating performance metrics to achieve favorable scores without actually meeting the underlying objectives those metrics were designed to promote. Exploits flaws...

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. When organizations optimize for a specific metric, individuals find ways to...

The organizational dynamic in which a team structured around a single exceptional individual produces results that cannot be attributed to, transferred from, or sustained...