Help Hurts

From SystemsWiki

There are often times when events arise which produce an associated time pressure for completion.

Fig. 1 - Time Pressure from events

More often than not, in name of expediency, help from others will be used to deal with the situation and relieve the time pressure.

Fig. 2 - Help from Others to Reduce Time Pressure [hlphrts1.smm]

The help factor is included simply to govern the rate at which the help from others actually creates reduce pressure to reduce the Time Pressure. The events factor is to govern the rate at which events occur to create Time Pressure. What is depicted in Fig. 2 is a Balancing Loop intended to reduce the Time Pressure.

Running the model as depicted to this point with events factor = 0.5 and help factor = 0.5 produces the graph in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3 - Balancing Loop to reduce Time Pressure

Click Reduce Time Pressure to run this model in your web browser.

Another approach to reducing Time Pressure would be to engage in self development to develop one's Capability and address the events creating Time Pressure. This is presented in Fig. 4. Don't be overly concerned with cap factor and dev factor as these are simply scaling factors to define the magnitude of the interactions.

Fig. 4 - Capability through self development to address events

This would be marvelous if this is all there was to it, though it's not. There is another relation that comes into play here. Time Pressure created a perceived sd need though at the same time help from others reduces the perceived sd need. Thus, in most cases, help from others offsets the perceived sd need from Time Pressure and self development doesn't occur. Fig. 5 presents this expanded model which is a Shifting the Burden structure, for which there is a well defined strategy.