The Logic of Failure

The Logic of Failure explores why leaders make bad decisions – and how to make better ones. Whenever I am asked for a book recommendation, this is always the first one I mention because I have learned so much from it, and what I have learned has helped me make better decisions every single day. This is an amazing, evidence-based effort to understand the root causes of failure and the pathways to success. It will help you understand how your plans can fail so that you can ensure they succeed.

We are often not successful at long-term forecasting or assessing unintended consequences. Dorner’s book takes a group of executives, gives them complete control over a third-world country, and challenges them to improve their quality of life. Only a very few succeed. You will need to figure out why so many top executives failed and why some succeeded. It’s worth your time to figure it out.

Originally written in German and published in English in the mid-1990s, this book has been out of print for a while. Nevertheless, find it and buy it. It is based on the provocative but accurate premise that more harm is done in this world by do-gooders who are unaware of the unintended consequences of what they are doing – than by people actually trying to cause harm! Dorner is a German psychologist who set up a lab to study how people make decisions in highly complex, dynamic, challenging environments (mayors of towns or humanitarian organizations in crisis situations), and what… show more.