I submitted to 'Planners' Newsletter', an e-mail forum within Shell. The boiled frog Many of us know the parable of the boiled frog. A frog dropped in water too hot to live in will quickly jump out of it. However, if you put a frog in cold water and warm it slowly it will stay in so long that, as soon as it finds out that the circumstances become hazardous, it is already in such a bad shape that it is no more able to escape from its hyperthermic demise.
Politicians are often quite similar in behaviour.
They can respond to disasters quite well but are in general not good in anticipating actions to avert disasters. Let me give an example from The Netherlands. From about 1930 onwards water engineers warned that dykes along the estuaries in the SW of The Netherlands were too low. Their warnings were ignored. Then tragedy struck.