Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
Reading school district strategic plans gets me thinking about the cobra effect, the unintended consequences that can result from an action or decision, particularly policy decisions. Two well-known examples come to mind.
The first example is the prohibition against the production, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States between 1920 and 1933. Prohibition was intended to eliminate consumption of alcohol which was considered immoral and a cause of social instability.
Prohibition didn’t produce the desired outcome. In fact, it led to the illicit production of alcohol in unsanitary conditions using dangerous methods that led to poisoning and death for some. The U.S. lost revenue from taxation of alcohol and incurred increased costs for law enforcement to counter the illegal production of alcohol by criminal organizations.
The second is, during British colonial rule in India, the government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra to decrease the cobra population. When the government discovered that some entrepreneurial individuals began to breed cobras to claim bounties, it terminated the bounty program. The entrepreneurial cobra breeders released their now-worthless snakes. The wild cobra population increased rather than decreased.
A decision that produces the opposite of the intended outcome is sometimes called a "Cobra Effect." I use both examples to make the point that it is important to think carefully about making changes in complex systems and to try to avoid making changes on inadequate evidence.
Each year schools and school boards make plans based upon what appear to be differences in performance from one year to the next. There are problems associated with strategic planning based on the perception of difference when no true differences have occurred. Chief among the problems is the potential for wasting resources.
Continuously responding to perceived differences without evidence of true differences can lead to a cycle of planning and re-planning without genuine evidence of progress. Decision-makers who consistently act on perceived differences that aren't substantiated may lose credibility with employees, parents, and the public.
If the perceived differences aren’t real, then resources (time, money, effort) spent addressing the matter might have been better allocated elsewhere. Moreover, implementing change often engenders resistance among employees. Changes made without evidence of a need for change can produce ‘change fatigue’ where employees become resistant to all changes, even ones that may be properly supported with evidence. Employees can be demotivated if they come to believe that decisions are being made based on inaccurate perceptions or vacuous findings rather than evidence. Worse yet, the employees could go through the motions of implementing changes in which they are little invested leaving the change leader to believe in their own effectiveness.
The cobra effect can be avoided by carefully considering the evidence upon which one’s plans are made and how those plans might produce unanticipated and unwanted outcomes.