While herding dogs may steer herds, the reality of herd behavior in human society is that it's near impossible to steer a herd of people.  While people can be individually smart, once a group of them start moving in a direction, it turns into a train.  Leaders of a group in motion can change only the speed of which the group moves.  Even worse, they will find it difficult to even get off the train.

Dorothy can't just stop in the middle of the yellow brick road and say 'Let's go back.'  You have to be either insanely courageous or stupid to be able to do that.  It's only after the trainwreck that one gets a chance to regret or wish otherwise.  It's kind of sad, but true.

In this sense, I am being unrealistic too when I say it's not too late to turn it back.  While we are all engineers, we are also human with emotions that binds us.  But then I believe that wastes, mistakes, and inefficiencies are part of what makes the world go around.  Otherwise, there wouldn't be any problems for our solutions.