[jacques_chester]

You'll see capability traps everywhere once you learn about them.

Sterman, Repenning and other collaborators wrote several papers after this one. All fascinating and almost entirely depressing.

Especially since MIT's Sloan school, where system dynamics first became a discipline, is just around the bend from Harvard Business school, where system dynamics first became ignored.

[macrocosmos]

One thing I don't get about the concept of capability traps is why is it expected that a company which is good at one thing would be capable at the new thing? What exactly makes a capability trap a trap?

[jacques_chester]

The trap is that you can't get better without first getting worse. You can't get out of the destructive cycle of production pressure and decaying productivity without removing the pressure. Many managers expect, or at least behave as if they expect, improvement to be monotonic and costless.