A culprit must be found!

Is Flick still the right man?
Bierhoff must go!
Those who no longer understand the world simplify it. And a culprit can always be found. The two headlines in Sport-Bild and Stern+ from yesterday, 03.12.22, show this. It is a widespread reaction to helplessness in a complex situation. Therefore, one looks for the cause, which does not exist in complex connections in such a way.

The crazy thing is that in our example, a change of coach is very likely to improve team performance, but that doesn’t prove that the root cause has been eliminated. Instead, it shows that systems forced to reorganize by an external intervention tend to reorganize at a more effective level.

A post on the subject worth reading was published three days ago by @Patric Thiele!

The destructive pattern, a culprit that must be found, is widespread in our everyday life. There it is, for example, a child with behavioural problems at school. As good as always, the first question asked is, what is wrong with this child. In this example, the professional standard is now that the entire system (home, school, child) is considered to identify possible connections.

Although the search for culprits is unfortunately still the rule, systemic thinking has also found its way into our working life when solving problems. For example, everyone knows by now that it makes more sense to find out how the interaction of different process flows could have led to an error than to identify and punish a culprit.

Unfortunately, this approach, which is correct in principle, selects too small a section of the overall system to be analyzed so that important factors, often the decision-makers, are not part of the analysis. This is not about the fact that the decision-makers could be the cause of the problem. As is well known, there are no causes!

Instead, it is a matter of focusing on the relationships and interactions of everyone with everything. This includes the exchange of the decision-makers with their teams and the rest of the system.

To come back to our starting point, soccer, it does not help to blame the team, as was done by the commentator of ARD on Thursday evening. What would be effective is a careful analysis of the highly complex web of relationships within the DFB. Although probably effective in the long term, the acute pain this would cause in some parts of the system is significant enough to prevent it.