Metaphor on the problem of over-constraining

I just read a useful metaphor in the book Gut Feelings: Short Cuts to Better Decision Making by Gerd Gigerenzer. This metaphor illustrates that simplifying complex situations or filtering complex situations into simplistic decisions is not very helpful:

To date I have met only one man, an economist, who reponded that he followed the Benjamin Franklin method to choose a partner. He sat down with a pencil and listed all the possible partners he could think of and all possible consequences he could image (such as whether she would still listen to him after being married). Next he put a number on the utilities of each consequence and then estimated the probabilities that each might come true. Finally, he multiplied the utilities with the probabilities and added them up. The woman he proposed to and married was the one with the highest expected utility, though he didn't tell her about his strategy. By the way, he is now divorced.

This metaphor is quite similar to Dave Snowden's Children's Party. Overconstraining a situation will not necessarily result in the outcome you expected. I also highlighted this issue in the column published for the Dutch KM journal 'Intellectueel Kapitaal'. In this column I agrued that businesses should be better in sharing and creating knowledge in order to plan scenarios and avoid profit warnings (something that happened quite a lot in the Netherlands over the last couple of weeks).