Cobra Effect · Decisions and strategy
Chesterton’s fence
Before removing a rule, find out why it was put there.
6 cards, read aloud in 1:42, with a test and sources.
There is a fence across the road. You want it gone.
G. K. Chesterton, 1929. A reformer finds a fence in a field and says it serves no purpose, clear it away. A wiser reformer says, go and find out why it is there, and then I may let you clear it.
The fence is every rule you inherited.
The odd step in the deploy checklist. The clause in the contract nobody reads. The approval that seems to slow everything down. Each one was built by someone, for a reason, at some cost.
I can’t see why it’s there is not the same as it isn’t needed.
It might be. But your not knowing is a fact about you, not about the fence. The reason may have left with the person who built it.
This is not an argument for keeping every fence.
Chesterton’s point is about the order of operations. Understand, then remove. Plenty of fences should go once you know what they were for.
The failure mode is the new manager.
Week one, they cancel the meeting everyone hates. Week six, they discover it was the only place two teams talked. The fence was ugly and load bearing.
The question to ask before you delete anything.
Who put this here, and what were they worried about? If you can answer it, you may clear the fence. If nobody can, find out before you do.
Sources
- The Thing, G. K. Chesterton, 1929. The fence is in the chapter called The Drift from Domesticity. Search the chapter title and the book is on several free text sites. Chesterton’s Wikipedia page covers the man and the argument.
- Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott, 1998. A whole book of reformers clearing fences they did not understand: forests, cities, farms. The best long answer to why the old arrangement was there.
- Chesterton’s fence, Wikipedia. The quotation in full and how it came to be used by engineers and policy people as a rule about the order of operations.
Nearby ideas
- Second order effects. Every fix has consequences, and those have consequences too.
- The sunk cost fallacy. Money already spent is gone, so it should not steer the next choice.
- The razors. Simple rules for cutting away explanations you do not need.
- Inversion. To find the path to success, first ask what would guarantee failure.
- The broken window fallacy. Destruction makes visible work and hides the cost of what was lost.
- The map is not the territory. Every model leaves something out, and that is where it fails.
- The pre-mortem. Imagine the project has already failed, then ask why, before it starts.
- The prisoner’s dilemma. Why two sensible people can both choose the worst outcome.