Fallibility in Human Organizations and Political Systems

This paper presents a perspective on some organizational consequences of human fallibility. It may be easier to get a flavor of the relevant issues by examining the role of fallibility in specific settings, rather than through abstract arguments. So, in the next three sections, I consider several different settings: the question of diversification versus concentration of political authority, the managerial succession process in organizations, and the choice of ideas and projects (including innovation-oriented projects) in organizations. In the last section, I highlight some aspects of the approach underlying the analyses of human fallibility, in particular: the premises concerning an individual decisionmaker, the potential association between the motivation of an organization's employees and their fallibility, and the nature and the aims of the analysis of organizations.