General Systems
Most politicians, pundits, Bloggers and interest groups advocate particular policies without taking into account, or trying to change the underlying political and economic systems. As a result, those policies, at best, bring only temporary improvement or, more commonly, result in harmful unintended consequences. Such efforts are common in politics but amount to “tampering” with the system - attempting to change systems without understanding how they work or how various changes will affect output.
In recent years businesses have had to adopt a systems approach because the economic and social environment is too dynamic for them to either do what they have always done or react after-the-fact to changing competitive conditions. Because it can take from 2 to 5 years for manufacturers of computer chips, mobile phones and automobiles to bring a new product from design to manufacturing, these companies need to anticipate future markets and have systems in place that both produce a steady stream of product and process innovations as well as a steady stream of new products from manufacturing.
Today the same is increasingly true for government and politicians as well: from the war in Iraq to Hurricane Katrina, the bird flu and global warming, the price to be paid for not anticipating problems and having systems in place ahead of time is simply too great. Our political and governmental systems need to be brought into the 21st Century before it is too late.
