I had a fairly involved conversation with an agent that was prepped with the SCRAP manuscript, a number of additional of my own blurbs, Predictatly Irrational, and much more. After ‘discussing’ it for quite a while, we arrived at the following way to make sense of these things. After doing this, I feel far better about how things like ‘bias’ are represented/made sense of in the book, and how SCRAP is simplified further. Thank you @TLooy for bringing up the book (it is still on my list for a full read or listen (i just bought it on audible) though, candidly). While some of the post below was part of a conversation with AI, I have reviewed every sentence and modified it quite a bit to use my words (other than the stuff about Predictably Irrational, which I have not read).
The central distinction
Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational argues that human beings are not consistently rational decision-makers. Our decisions are systematically influenced by forces such as anchoring, expectations, social norms, ownership, framing, comparisons, and cognitive biases. Importantly, these effects are not merely random errors: they are sufficiently regular that irrational behavior can often be predicted.
There is a meaningful connection between this idea and Organizational SCRAP, but the two works operate at fundamentally different levels.
Ariely is primarily concerned with why people make the decisions they make.
Organizational SCRAP is concerned with what organizations construct, accumulate, perpetuate, and operate within as a consequence of human decisions and behavior.
This distinction is important because Organizational SCRAP should not become a psychology book, a behavioral-economics book, or an attempt to explain every cause of organizational dysfunction. It is a concept primarily for people who don’t have those credentials, who find themselves in leadership positions of any level facing these problems, or for people in organizations where they are tired of dealing with the same and want to make a difference. There are already substantial bodies of work, including Predictably Irrational, devoted to explaining cognitive biases and human decision-making. SCRAP can draw upon that work without attempting to reproduce it. But SCRAP does rub up against psychology and behavior and at times dips a toe in, as I do believe that at some point it may be necessary to tackle those directly. Maybe (see below) 
A useful boundary is:
SCRAP describes what the organization has constructed and/or evolved into, not necessarily the psychological reasons people constructed it.
Bias as a Weapon of SCRAP
Specific biases may show up as assumptions in some cases but is not always classified Assumptions within the SCRAP taxonomy. In the manuscript, biases are more appropriately described as weapons of SCRAP.
Biases can contribute to the:
creation → reinforcement → protection → regeneration of SCRAP
People bring cognitive tendencies into organizations. When those tendencies repeatedly influence decisions and behaviors, they can become embedded in Structures, Culture, Rules, Assumptions, and Processes.
This can happen deliberately, but frequently it happens organically. A behavior occurs repeatedly. Others accept or imitate it. No one questions it. It becomes expected. Eventually the organization operates as though that behavior were simply “how things work here.”
At that point, the psychological explanation for the original behavior becomes less important to the SCRAP diagnosis (though the existing of it is really important to make sense of)
For example, imagine people consistently avoid publicly disagreeing with senior executives. Authority bias might contribute to this behavior. Fear of retaliation might contribute. Organizational history might contribute. Incentives might contribute. Several forces might operate simultaneously.
SCRAP does not need to resolve that debate.
If the organization consistently operates according to:
Do not publicly contradict the senior leader.
then this has effectively become an unwritten Rule.
The Rule can be identified and examined without proving the psychological mechanism that originally produced it.
This distinction keeps SCRAP intentionally bounded, and so it remains as a door-opener to dealing with deeper values problems, biases, etc. It exposes them via exposiing the things that have become the shape and behaviors of the org, so that they have nowhere to hide. My work talks about that exposing, and working on the objective portion of it- the SCRAP itself. I believe that when doing so systematically and repeatably, it will influence and potentially, indirectly, result in work that can overcome bias in the same way that repeating a kata as a martial arts initiate can create a foundation for them from which to begin to question “why does this move work”?
When Bias Becomes Institutionalized
An individual’s bias is not necessarily Organizational SCRAP.
The organizational phenomenon becomes more interesting when individual or collective tendencies become institutionalized.
Consider status quo bias. Leaders repeatedly demand far greater justification for changing established practices than for continuing them. Over time, this tendency might produce:
- a Structure that gives incumbent groups veto authority;
- a Culture that regards challengers as naïve or disruptive;
- a Rule requiring extraordinary approval for exceptions;
- an Assumption that existing practices must have good reasons behind them;
- a Process requiring extensive review before experimentation.
Eventually, the people who originally created these organizational artifacts may leave.
The organization can nevertheless continue behaving in accordance with the original bias.
This produces an important causal sequence:
Human tendency or bias → decisions and repeated behavior → S/C/R/A/P → organizational persistence
Once encoded, SCRAP no longer requires the originating people—or even the originating bias—to survive.
That is one reason Organizational SCRAP matters. Organizations can preserve yesterday’s judgments long after anyone remembers making them. (e.g., “that’s just the way we’ve always done things”)
SCRAP Can Also Reinforce the Forces That Created It
The relationship can become circular:
Bias → SCRAP → behavior → apparent evidence → reinforced bias → more SCRAP
Suppose leaders assume employees cannot be trusted to make consequential decisions.
They create approval structures and processes that centralize decisions.
Employees consequently receive little practice exercising independent judgment.
When employees are eventually given autonomy, some struggle with it.
Leadership observes this and concludes:
“See? People aren’t capable of making these decisions.”
The organization has now helped manufacture evidence supporting the assumption that produced the system in the first place.
This feedback mechanism is expressed in Organizational SCRAP without explaining the underlying psychology. The important point for SCRAP is that organizational artifacts can both embody previous thinking and create conditions that perpetuate it.
Objectivity Is an Important Boundary
One aspiration for Organizational SCRAP is to make organizational problems concrete enough that people can discuss them without requiring agreement about motivations, psychology, or intent.
Two people might disagree:
“People defer to executives because of authority bias.”
and:
“No. They defer because executives have historically punished disagreement.”
SCRAP does not necessarily need to settle the argument, and those same two people still can work on what they now can agree on, the SCRAP. Both people may be able to quickly agree that:
People in this organization routinely avoid publicly challenging senior leaders.
The conversation can then move to the organizational manifestations:
- What unwritten Rules support that behavior?
- What Structures reinforce it?
- What Processes make it difficult to behave differently?
- What Assumptions have developed around it?
- What aspects of Culture normalize it?
This may be one of SCRAP’s important practical advantages:
SCRAP does not require agreement about motives before people can examine how the organization actually works.
Side note: Structures, formal Rules, and documented Processes may often be directly observable. Culture, unwritten Rules, and Assumptions sometimes require inference from patterns of behavior.
Therefore, observable and falsifiable may be a more defensible standard than literally indisputable.
SCRAP should seek evidence that allows people to say, “Yes, this appears to be how our organization operates,” rather than requiring them to agree on why everyone involved thinks or behaves as they do.
The Relationship to Predictably Irrational
This makes Predictably Irrational complementary to Organizational SCRAP rather than a competing or overlapping theory.
Ariely and behavioral economists can help explain:
Why are human beings susceptible to behaving this way?
SCRAP asks:
What happens when human beings repeatedly encode their decisions, beliefs, habits, and responses into an organization?
Behavioral economics therefore provides one explanation for forces that create and protect SCRAP.
Organizational SCRAP addresses what those forces leave behind.
This also means SCRAP should probably resist becoming a catalog of cognitive biases. Confirmation bias, sunk-cost effects, loss aversion, authority bias, groupthink, cognitive dissonance, and related phenomena may be useful illustrations of weapons that create or protect SCRAP, but explaining their psychological foundations is outside the book’s scope.
Other researchers and authors are considerably better positioned to explain those phenomena.
SCRAP can acknowledge that work and then continue from where it leaves off:
Whatever caused people to make these choices, what did those choices create inside the organization?
A particularly useful consequence of this boundary is:
We don’t have to correctly diagnose the weapon to correctly identify the SCRAP.
Someone might argue:
“That process exists because of loss aversion.”
Another person might respond:
“No. It exists because of a regulatory incident fifteen years ago.”
Both explanations could even contain some truth.
The SCRAP conversation can begin somewhere simpler:
Does the process exist?
What does it cause people to do?
What purpose does it serve today?
Does that purpose still justify its consequences?
This keeps Organizational SCRAP grounded in things organizations can identify and act upon rather than requiring managers to become amateur psychologists.
The Larger Idea
The comparison with Predictably Irrational exposes a useful distinction between individual irrationality and organizational dysfunction.
What appears to be irrational organizational behavior may actually consist of highly rational individual behavior inside an environment full of SCRAP. (Aside: I hope I am not full of SCRAP hahaha)
People follow the approval process because bypassing it carries consequences.
They attend the pointless meeting because absence is noticed.
They avoid challenging the executive because doing so has historically been costly.
They continue funding the initiative because the organization’s mechanisms make stopping it harder than continuing it.
From the individual’s perspective, these choices may be entirely rational.
Yet collectively they produce an organization almost everyone recognizes as dysfunctional.
This leads to a potentially important SCRAP proposition:
Locally rational behavior can produce collectively irrational outcomes when people operate within accumulated organizational SCRAP.
Ariely demonstrates that apparently irrational human decisions become more understandable once we recognize the hidden forces influencing the decision-maker.
Organizational SCRAP can perform an analogous—but importantly different—function at the organizational level.
Instead of asking only:
Why are these people behaving this way?
SCRAP asks:
What have we built around them that makes behaving this way sensible, expected, or unavoidable?
And once those Structures, Cultures, Rules, Assumptions, and Processes become visible, an organization has something concrete it can examine and change.
One concept here that I may want to emphasize more in the book: “We don’t have to correctly diagnose the weapon to correctly identify the SCRAP.” In other words, in the bias example, “we don’t have to correctly diagnose or fix the bias in order to identify and work on the SCRAP”.
It separates SCRAP from organizational psychology and reinforces the objective diagnostic character you’re aiming for.
Those who see things like bias as a root cause of organizational dysfunction may be dissatisfied with this. I would ask them to have patience, bring their expertise and education on such things to the table, but have patience as we train many, many people without psych degrees or professional coaching certs to practice identifying SCRAP that exists - those structures culture rules assumptions processes that don’t serve our purpose or that get in the way - and work on those. I believe that doing so, over time, will result in them arriving at a place where they can tackle deeper matters. So, in a nutshell, I am in a way saying:
Don’t try to tackle fear, biases, values, beliefs, or other such things which are protected by psyche.
Do try to tackle the conditions in the organization that make those things valuable, appealing or comfortable to subscribe to.
(disclaimer: the quote above I am still sitting with and working on)
This is a long, deep post and gets to some of the real essence of SCRAP. ALL comments welcome!