By Eldar Sharif
Scarcity can mean many things. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough food. Sharif discusses the nature of scarcity, how it affects our thinking and our actions. How we can plan with it and around it.
Scarcity causes a mental tunnel vision. Where we struggle to think past our scarce resources. Take a deadline, for example. For many people this really focuses our attention and allow us to get things done. That is the downside... our attention is focused on the deadline. It's difficult to think outside the box.
Hunger, food scarcity, causes the same thing. It's difficult to get someone who is short on food to think past their hunger. They will make many poor short term decisions to get food immediately, rather than thinking long term, to create a long term supply of food.
Slack-- In the drive to be efficient we often cut slack out of the schedule, or the budget. This can cause greater problems than it solves. It means that the plan must be upended the moment there is an unforeseen crisis, and there are always unforeseen crises. The solution here is to build some slack into planning so that emergencies can be dealt with.
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