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I don't remember which book specifically, but in one of Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books the idea of first, second and third thoughts is put forth. I think it might be in a discussion between Tiffany and Granny Weatherwax. Fourth thoughts might even occur in there somewhere.
If I recall correctly, the idea is something along the lines of first thoughts being your initial assessment of a situation, i.e. the server has stopped working. Second thoughts are then an attempt to understand what has happened - someone has spilt their cup of tea on the server and fried it. Third thoughts are then thinking about why the situation occurred at all - seriously, why was someone drinking tea in the server room with all the critical systems in the first place?
I tend to assume that this is the obvious thought process for most people in most cases, which often puts me a little off kilter when it becomes obvious that it's not. I've had a couple of these recently, one personal, one in something that idiomdrottning wrote.
The personal, or rather work instance is an HR related thing. They're all in on on trying to maintain/improve culture as the institute goes through some fairly big changes. Their heart's in the right place I think, but we're in the process of a whole bunch of workshops and surveys to "understand" and "measure certain aspects" of our workplace culture. Lots of those god awful circular plots with 12 different radial axes labelled things like "trust" and "initiative". They've had first thoughts - we need to manage this change we're going through and make sure everyone's taken care of", they've even had second thoughts - how do we do this, lets get some consultants in to help us through the process. It feels like the third thoughts are missing though - what are the consequences of measuring only certain aspects of culture, and measuring them in this way? Or even - should we be attempting to measure culture at all?
We are a research institute, I worry sometimes that the science side of the brains in the upper echelons just want the pretty graphs.
And then on the bus into town this morning, I was reading a post from Idiondrottning, where they were taking issue (I think) with a post someone else had made. The first line of the post being commented on was a house divided cannot stand, talking about American politics. It did feel someone that the post being commented on was operating under the assumption that the house should be made to stand. I ... don't know that I agree. The house is divided. Maybe the first thing that should be looked at is should the house be torn down?