Through the years I've had the good fortune to work on several complex projects for Vince Barabba (more about Vince here and here). Vince is a true leader -- visionary, creative, and effective. One of the management approaches he often applied was the use of modeling to help him and his team understand a complex situation and make good decisions. In fact, I consider Vince the ultimate "model consumer." That is, he did not write complex systems models -- he used them and guided others in their use and interpretation. This paper provides one detailed example of how he worked.
Vince had a guiding principle in the application of complex models that became known as "Barabba's Law". Here it is:
Never Say "The Model Says"
-- Vince Barabba
I've think I've sat in a hundred meetings where we were using a systems simulation model to understand some complex, uncertain, situation and at some point someone would say -- but the model says . . . . If you where working on a project for Vince (or even if you had EVER worked on a project for Vince) then you knew it was time to pause the action and reflect about what was happening. Because as soon as those words are uttered then somebody is about to depend on the model as a literal prediction of the future instead of a tool to "make sense" of the situation to support their decision making.
I started writing about sense-making in my last post but here it is again: Making Sense is the development of situational awareness including an understanding of the future trajectory of the system.
At the time, though, I didn't spend much energy thinking about the underlying philosophy of Barabba's Law. What I observed is that forcing a different choice of language inherently guided stakeholders towards a different and more effective application of the modeling. The nature of the team discussion changed from predictive thinking towards evaluating the correctness and completeness of the underlying causal hypothesis that the model represented.
Barabba's Law closes the, often disastrous, thinking shortcut that allows leaders to abdicate responsibility for understanding the relevant system and its behavior. ( "Gee, we thought we were doing the right thing because the model said we were. . ." )
I think that one of the reasons Vince was so effective in using sophisticated models is that he instinctively understood the difference between prediction and sense making (although I never heard him use exactly those words). Through his extensive experience he understood how leaders actually make decisions and he knew how to integrate sophisticated modeling into that process. And he distilled some of that into his law.
