In 1985, when famine and starvation were ravaging Africa, an altruistic Irish rock music singer named Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof decided (with the help of a few industry colleagues) that enough was enough. Within that year a new “Band Aid” was born – a massive global initiative using music to encourage charity and donations to help solve a desperate humanitarian crisis. It culminated in a dual-venue trans-Atlantic concert event (Live Aid) and was highly successful, raising well over $100 million. Live Aid significantly increased awareness of the plight of Africa and had a profound effect on the concept of crowd-funding, philanthropy and charity that we see today. It was also, unfortunately and eponymously, largely a band-aid solution.
Despite the enormous fund raising and increased global awareness, famine and poverty still cripple Africa’s fortunes today.
One of the reasons for this outcome is what risk management professionals call “consequence fixation”. In essence, it is the predominant focus on consequences, effects and (usually) negative outcomes of events (and applying mitigative solutions to these) rather than applying commensurate effort to eliminating or preventing the root causes of these events at source.
The sticky problem with consequence fixation is it leads to the expense of far greater effort and ongoing cost for the implementation of the band-aid solution while not actually addressing the original cause/s. This in turn allows the original causes and consequences to escalate, propagate and/or evolve into, or feed other problems. Sometimes, even preventative solutions fail to address root causes and instead satisfy only an aspect of a problem or create new root causes in the process. These outcomes become layered and intertwined, perpetuating the overall disaster, which then becomes overwhelming.
Social unrest, violence, corruption, genocide, pandemic disease, environment destruction, diaspora, poverty – all are evident in Africa’s ongoing plight. But where does that plight originate from and what are its root causes? Climate? Geography? Politics? Culture? Are we addressing these in the long term or are we continually responding cyclically with band-aid solutions? The web of contributing factors is complex.
Engineering design suffers the same problem.
So why do we get fixated? Because the truth hurts and reality is often confronting, unwelcome and highly challenging. Identifying root causes in the design of any system, changing in-grained habits and altering decades of displaced blame requires profound and often disruptive change. We humans resist change. It also requires early identification, which itself necessitates insight and introspection often when timeframes are compressed. We sell ourselves the idea that a band-aid will suffice or we accept “safeguards” that on the surface seem to attenuate the consequences but in reality create even more problems of their own.
Is there a solution? Yes. Identify and earnestly attack the root cause. There are many ways to achieve this as evidenced by the hierarchy of controls commonly referred to in risk management circles: Elimination, Substitution, Innovation, Attenuation, Administration and Protection. Remembering that consequences may have multiple causes (and that causes may lead to multiple consequences). But there are always root causes.
There is one other reason for “consequence fixation” that many won’t acknowledge. There is money in band-aids (and band-aid solutions). If eliminating a root cause effectively takes away the root of (say) a client’s demand for a band aid dispenser’s services then a conflict of interest arises. Ongoing treatments for fixated consequences generate income in all sorts of ways. Risk treatment is an industry. If that same iterative attention was paid to addressing the root cause eventually it could be eliminated (together with the consequences and safeguards).
Analogously, the Johnson & Johnson Company has made an estimated one hundred billion Band-Aids™ since their invention in 1920. The company’s employee and cotton buyer Earle Dickson noticed that his new wife, Josephine, repeatedly suffered minor cuts and burns in her domestic duties and found dressings hard to self-apply. The pair developed an ingenious little cotton based device for dressing Josephine’s injuries using two of his employers existing products – surgical adhesive tape and gauze – and the idea was further engineered and exploited commercially by Earle’s employer and company president James Wood Johnson. The popularity of the Band-Aid has never waned and there is no doubt that it serves a simple purpose. But did anyone ask why or how Josephine Dickson was getting so many cuts and burns in the first place that necessitated so many dressings?
Consequence fixation is sticky stuff.
