[bob1029]

I've seen something like this in B2B consulting. The decision makers (our customers) have a difficult time parsing all the complex variables and wind up making really bad assumptions that turn into a vicious cycle of broken expectations and even more complexity. I think the basic human flaw here is impatience.

The opposite experience was had in semiconductor manufacturing. Not a soul in those engineering offices would hazard the remotest assumption about a problem until many hours of confirmation occurred first. No one wanted to be the reason something got even more complicated.

[b3morales]

A possible explanation, from the book Thinking Fast and Slow: when confronted with an intractable (or even just very difficult) problem, the human mind has a tendency to substitute an easier problem and solve that instead. It's tricky to catch yourself doing this, and group inertia makes it harder.