Selfish pride aside, I think the answer to your last question is: yes — and no.

Yes, we are doomed to keep chasing after unattainable goals, if those goals can be reduced to trying to find silver bullets. Whether we are talking about management dashboards or ERP, we are doomed to fail as long as we try to introduce them as the solution to whatever ails us.

And no, if we start thinking of these tools as part of comprehensive solutions that include much more than just ICT, we can make some real progress and are much less likely to go around in our little circles.

And, in fact, I am fairly hopeful that exactly that is slowly starting to happen. I have now seen (from a distance) two major projects in humanitarian organisations in which such a systems approach was taken, with promising results. Neither of the projects is really finished yet, so it remains to be seen whether my hopes will be justified — but the bare fact that the systems-thinking approach is finally getting at least some traction is a very good sign.

As always, there is a drawback, too. Systems thinking is not easy, and approaching a problem from a systems angle will almost always involve solutions that are complex (not necessarily complicated, but very likely complex) and hence less likely to get approval. Managers are simple people who like simple solutions — and they are completely right, because the simpler the solution, the less likely it is to fall apart in the implementation. What they don’t see is that many of the simple ‘solutions’ that they are presented with are so often no solutions at all, for exactly the reasons that you set out here. Simple rule of thumb: if your solution can be written on a postcard, it probably solves nothing.

Which explains why this is a bit longer than a postcard.