2Bobs—with David C. Baker and Blair Enns The Problem of Mechanistic Thinking
Dec 31, 2025
David and Blair dive into the fallacy of viewing businesses as mere machines. They discuss why mechanistic thinking is prevalent and its limitations, especially in complex organizations. The conversation shifts to how individual agency and culture shape unpredictable outcomes. Blair raises concerns about AI's overconfidence in predictions, linking it back to this flawed thinking. The duo also warns against prioritizing efficiency over adaptability, urging a more nuanced approach to managing firms in a world that thrives on complexity.
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Business As A Living System
- Businesses are complex adaptive systems, not predictable machines.
- Adding people creates independent agents whose interactions produce emergent, unpredictable outcomes.
Nonlinearity Beats Prediction
- Complex systems have dynamic, nonlinear, and emergent relationships between parts.
- Predicting outcomes of changes in such systems is fundamentally unreliable.
Bodies Adapt, Plans Don’t
- Treating bodies as machines misunderstands adaptation and weight loss.
- Biological systems adjust (e.g., basal metabolic rate falls), so simple tweaks often fail.
