The Root Cause: Rethink Your Approach to Solving Stubborn Enterprise-Wide Problems

CHAPTER 4

Mind Shift: The Antidote to the Peter Principle

Sometimes it’s the very people whom no one imagines anything of, who do the very things that no one can imagine.

—Christopher Morcomclose friend of Alan Turing, OBE FRS, and World War II codebreaker at Bletchley Park, England, UK

The Peter Principle strikes decision makers who, in the face of systemic problems, feel conflicted. They experience a restriction of consciousness (recall Figure 2.1) when their old and familiar principles fail to explain or predict current organizational behavior, while being unaware, or having rejected the validity of principles that would explain and predict their current situation. No wonder they experience confusion, which was described by American writer ...