Faced with a performance gap the two most obvious responses are to work harder or work smarter. There are trade offs associated with each, some obvious, some not so obvious.

Derived from Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened: Creating and Sustaining Process Improvement by Repenning and Sterman.

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From Margaret Stringfellow's PhD thesis from Nancy Leveson's Engineering a Safer World

From FIg.2 Past the Tipping Point:THe Persistence of Firefighting in Product Development by Nelson Repenning, Paulo Goncalves and Laura Black. Calif. Mgt. Review 43(4) p44-63 (2001). Also  From William E. Novak and  Linda Levine CMU SEI Sept 2010 Success in Acquisition: Using Archetypes to Beat the Odds paper and see webpage

This map is a WIP derived from the MIT D-memo 4641 presentation by Nelson Repenning 1996 and the paper "Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened: Creating and Sustaining Process Improvement" by Nelson P. Repenning and John D Sterman. http://bit.ly/jCXGKL See Insight 9781 for a simulation of this model. This map adds additional features mentioned in the article to the bare bones simulation in IM-9781

Replaced by IM-752 Causal Loop Rich Picture unfolding from Repenning, N. and J. Sterman (2002). Capability Traps and Self-Confirming Attribution Errors in the Dynamics of Process Improvement. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47: 265 - 295. http://jsterman.scripts.mit.edu/docs/Repenning-2002-CapabilityTraps.pdf

Regulation of resource allocation to service in response to service quality. A non-price-mediated resource allocation system. From Sterman JD Business Dynamics p172 Fig 5-27

Jenny W. Rudolph Nelson P.Repenning Disaster Dynamics: Understanding the Role of Quantity in Organizational Collapse Administrative Science Quarterly,47(2002):1-30 paper