Decisions and actions by people in leadership were and are always analyzed and discussed by a broad range of people. The discussions vary in depth greatly, most often looking at the immediate effects. Like a tax hike or a product that is discontinued, a change in rules or some change in relationships between different organizations.

Apart from these straight forward effects, the discussions usually extrapolate into the future or areas that are not directly related. This additional time and network dimensions are the ones that allow for any amount of complexity to arise. This is also the place where overpuzzling happens.

An Example

There might be a change from subsidies of renewable energies back to fossil fuels. On a superficial level this is saving money as the infrastructure for renewable energies is not built out. Instead, existing supply chains and companies will be relied on. But on a second look, this also has repercussions on future technologies, on strategic alliances with fossil fuel consuming and producing powers and in a greater context climate change.

The question now arises, is the decision taking all of this into account? Or was it just a short sighted reactionary change. A deeper or shallower understanding of all these additional dimensions is projected on the deciding body.

It usually culminates in long essays trying to suss out the level of understanding with increasing detail and increasing horizon in time and impact on additional interconnected systems. This is overpuzzling, projecting a more elaborate understanding and strategic thinking than actually applied by the decision makers.

The discussion itself is valuable of course, as it allows for anyone listening to formulate better responses. With the caveat that this discourse is slow and needs the people in power to be able to deal with this complexity and map it to their governing processes.

Puzzling Actors

Unfortunately, understanding at which depth someone is acting is crucial in crafting responses or mitigating actions.

Imagine someone just messing with governmental processes. It might just be incompetence or there might be a larger goal behind it. Both are dangerous, but would lead to different actions.

In abstract, for this reason, a working model of each actor has to be created and continuously checked if the decision making matches the model.

This takes a lot of effort and has the common fallacy where the complexity of ones own decision making is attributed to the counterpart. When sometimes, "yes it is just that stupid" - is the full analysis.

How to Potentially Deal

There are two perspectives to take into account. Yourself or the organization you are part of, and the party that made the decision. It also depends on if a change needs an immediate response or if there is time to act.

As yourself the amount of complexity to take into account should be as broad as possible, with the constraint that not all dimensions can be taken into account and there might be hidden impacts. A good first step would be to focus on the majorly impacted dimensions or systems by ranking them. Anything that requires a rapid response has, in the best case, already a plan worked out. In general, hedging is the best approach, minimizing any change either over time or affected people. In the end, trying to be dependent as little as possible on outside influences is the ideal.

Analyzing the party that made a change is worthwhile as it might give insight into future disruptions. This depends strongly on how rational or irrational an actor behaves. In general any incoherent, antagonistic or chaotic action leads to a desire to create a buffer or distance. But keeping close ties as much as possible is always a good choice as well, even if it only works as an early warning system. And it makes it easier to exert some influence to mitigate impacts. Where the line between engagement and buffer lies is always difficult to find.

As you can see actually describing effective actions in the abstract is challenging. The best way to deal with this is to have skilled and knowledgeable people in positions to advice or in power. And the actual difficulty is to find and get people like this into the right positions.

Media Influence

The media creates the image of how we perceive some organization or person. The image is never the real one, as there is always bias. A great example are different "news" channels that cater to different demographics. They try to overpuzzle positively as a way to secure a base of power for their owner or political class.

Media can be used bi-directional, either by the deciding body to justify their decisions, for manufacturing approval or cultural shaping. On the other hand by a think tank, media owners, or other group of people with an agenda. Then media is used to create a narrative to force a decision by leadership.

Manufacturing a decision can backfire as well as leadership will find a simplified version in media to generate support. Full complexity does not work on the public and this might lead to a bizarre over simplified reactionary change.

For any outside actor following the biased media, the only useful information is usually the spin itself. This in itself can be valuable, because some actions might be predicted on the current culture like tightening immigration policy for example. But taking any actual policy discussion at face value is a wasted effort as the actual interpretation by the targeted leadership is not knowable. It would be better to find contacts directly or checking other sources of information.

Some Personal Advice

Overpuzzling will never go away, as reasoning about the impact of changes will never vanish. The only thing to take home is to be aware that you might ascribe cleverness to something which is not.

An advice I always follow is to check if people are taking their time in responses to outside actions, their specific phrasing in announcements and possible hedges. If I find those then some thought must have gone into a response or decision.

If I find rapid responses, rapid polar changes and drama then I am convinced there is chaos or incompetence. I do not believe creating chaos is a viable decision approach or strategy in itself. Especially on large scales.