Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Organizations trapped in constant production pressure abandon process improvement, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of declining capability.
Repenning and Sterman analyze why companies spend over $100 billion annually on process improvement programs with minimal results. Using system dynamics modeling, they identify a structural trap: when performance gaps emerge, managers pressure employees to "work harder" (increasing hours and effort) rather than "work smarter" (investing in capability improvement). The Work Harder loop produces immediate results but consumes time needed for improvement activities. A Reinvestment loop then reinforces this pattern: as pressure to produce rises, time available for improvement shrinks, capability erodes, performance gaps widen, and pressure increases further. The model shows that Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, and similar initiatives fail not because the techniques lack merit, but because organizational structures and incentives systematically prioritize short-term output over long-term capability building. The delay between improvement investments and results (months for simple processes, years for complex ones) makes managers abandon improvement when immediate crises demand attention.
What commenters are saying
Commenters affirmed the model's relevance, citing Y2K as a historical test case: spending $100 billion to fix COBOL systems prevented catastrophic infrastructure failures that never visibly occurred, yet critics later dismissed the spending as wasteful. A thread participant who worked on Wales's water and gas company Y2K remediation noted that system shutdown would have caused deaths in winter without fixes, and that companies paid retired developers substantial sums because training new COBOL developers was slower. The broader point: problems that are successfully prevented disappear from notice, leaving no evidence of the intervention's value. Commenters also noted the capability trap model appears everywhere once recognized, and expressed frustration that system dynamics research from MIT Sloan remained largely ignored by Harvard Business School nearby.