When foresight seems impeccable, things still go wrong. Why?
Purpose – This article seeks to provide a systematic examination of the unanticipated results following the introduction of various types of new policy, process, design, product or service.Design/methodology/approach – A rough taxonomy categorizes the generic kinds of unintentional consequences.Findings – Careless political, technical, commercial, military or even personal decisions often underlie the most problematic of secondary effects.Originality/value – Unscheduled second‐ or third‐order effects have often been attributed to a “law” governing such phenomena. Although no such law exists, there exist indeed the unwanted effects – and sometimes on a grand scale, too often a bane of humankind.
Strategic Assessment in War
How do military organizations assess strategic policy in war? In this book Scott Gartner develops a theory to explain how military and government leaders evaluate wartime performance, how much they change strategies in response to this evaluation, and why they are frequently at odds when discussing the success or failure of strategic performance. Blending history, decision theory, and mathematical modeling, Gartner argues that military personnel do reevaluate their strategies and that they measure the performance of a strategy through quantitative, "dominant" indicators. But different actors within a government use different indicators of success: some will see the strategy as succeeding when others see it as failing because of their different dominant indicators. Gartner tests his argument with three case studies: the British shift to convoys in World War I following the German imposition of unrestricted submarine warfare; the lack of change in British naval policy in the Battle of the Atlantic following the German introduction of Wolf Packs in World War II; and the American decision to deescalate in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive. He also tests his approach in a nonwar situation, analyzing the Carter Administration's decision to launch the hostage rescue attempt. In each case, his dominant indicator model better predicts the observed behavior than either a standard-organization or an action-reaction approach.
The evaluation of the competency perception of inspectors in using new instructional technology
Abstract The purpose of this study is to find out the evaluation of inspectors in regards to their competency perceptions towards the use of new instructional technologies. This is a qualitative model research. The target population of this study consisted of 25 inspectors serving within the borders of TRNC in 2011. Data was collected by an “interview form” developed by the researcher. The interview form consisted of 6 items. Content analyze, frequency (f) and percentage (%) techniques were used to analyze the data. This research pointed out that: “concerns on falling behind the teacher”, “training needs”, “decreasing training support within the years” and “non existing policy on IT support” are critical factors affecting an inspector's competency perceptions in using new instructional technologies.