Operation Cat Drop
The law of unintended consequences
The Setup
The third law of physics states that for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. The first law of thermodynamics is that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it changes from one form to another. These two laws are some of the earliest works on systems thinking.
While the concept of systems thinking has existed for hundreds (probably thousands) of years, it is still largely unused in business. For this post I’ll share an example of system thinking gone wrong.
The Why?
In the 1950’s there had been a large outbreak of malaria that had been associated with mosquitos. To eradicate the mosquitos the World Health Organization (WHO) came to Borneo and spread DDT to kill the mosquitos. The percentage of mosquitoes carrying the malaria-causing parasite fell from 35.6% to 1.6% during a 2-year period in Borneo in the 1950’s (NIH). This is where system design kicks into full force, see the image below.
What do you do now?
Now instead of malaria the country of Borneo now has been infected by the plague. Given the situation what do you do?
- Attempt to reverse the system by bringing back cats
- Bring back the mosquitoes
- Place rat traps around the country
- Do nothing, let the ecological system do its magic
The actual response was #1. The unique design was that the Royal Air Force flew in 14,000 cats and dropped them via parachute. In my research I was unable to find anything that suggests that dropping the cats ended up in a worse scenario for the country, so it appears that reversing the approach was the best call.
To get to this point they clearly had to understand the system, which is reasonable given that over 10 years took place between the DDT efforts in the mid 50s to the cat drop in 1965. It is also likely that option #4, do nothing, was what truly had the largest impact. The ecological system was likely able to respond naturally to the unbalance over the course of many years.
There is much we don’t know about the natural environment and by limiting our thinking to simple, non-systematic models, we risk further challenges. Take time to question solutions that sound too good to be true, because they are likely glossing over a tradeoff that is being made.
After the Cat Drop
After the DDT experiments in the 50’s a growing community of activists arose to better understand the system impacts. Rachel Carson released her influential book “Silent Spring” in 1962 that started an environmental movement against chemicals like DDT.
Unfortunately for Borneo and many countries that were treated with DDT malaria has returned and continues to be an epidemic to address. The image below shows that Borneo still has a presence in the rural areas of the country. The Gates Foundation and many other organizations continue to search for an approach.
In Closing…
Operation Cat Drop should serve as a cautionary tale for thinking that your action won’t impact others, similar to the butterfly effect story. There are very few decisions that don’t have some trade-off to be made. We teach our kids early on how to value consequences, but often as adults don’t think beyond ourselves on the impact on others.
Next week I’ll go through a value chain analysis which can be used as a basis for understanding the system. In a future post will also go through journey mapping which like the value chain does a good job to frame up a system.
References
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2636426/
Page 6 of the WHO newsletter from June 2005
