Chesterton's Fence
en.wiktionary.org
en.wiktionary.org
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070757
Also, "The Fallacy of Chesterton’s Fence (2014)":
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063246
And "Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking" from 2020:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533484
"Taking a Fence Down" from 2017:
Successful integration into a company requires a curiosity attitude and assuming that decisions in the past were made to the best of that company's capabilities at the time. Taking this path allows one to become part of the solution, rather than merely pointing out problems. One can drive change from within and rally the existing staff into new ways of thinking about the problem and co-develop solutions and cause impact and positive advancement.
Failure to integrate is when incoming staff feel they have the answers to all the issues and they feel they are bringing 'fire to the caveman', so to speak. These people generally spend their entire tenure fighting the existing staff, thus gaining no traction, no influence, and are unable to change anything for the better. People in this situation will generally (and incorrectly) blame the existing structure for 'not being visionary enough' or 'unable to adapt to change'. These people are very self-righteous and stubborn, but ultimately get burned out and leave and claim 'they just weren't ready for me yet'.
I'm sure there's dozens of personality traits and onboarding conditions (e.g. telling an incoming senior leader not to trust anyone, and to 'fix the mess') that contribute to success or failure here, so it's not this clear cut, but advice to anyone changing jobs - gain influence and understanding, and then change things.
In my work as a business advisor, this is a concept I use A LOT! Even long term team members or owners may be unaware of why things are the way they are, and it's especially prevalent in new management hires who feel obliged to make changes and prove their worth quickly.
As a simple example, I had a client once who was subconsciously obsessed with cash flow. (To add more clichés, he saw it as 'once bitten, twice shy' and I saw it as 'Generals are always fighting the last war'.) His team would often propose ideas that would improve profit margins, and not understand why they were shot down or poorly implemented. By helping the founder, and then his team, understand how every strategic decision was driven by its impact on cash flow, all of that frustrated energy shifted. And then I got him a better accountant, who was briefed around what the motivating factor was.
Once you understand the context behind a decision, even if your instinct to remove the fence was correct you can still do so more effectively.
It’s too risky and expensive to reformulate, so these stick around over the decades as interesting solutions to unknown problems :)
Super curious to see how this manifests in software a century from now when digital archeologists will be required to fix things.
> Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. [wikipedia]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton'...
Really glad to finally know where this story comes from. I yell it at my students all the time.
1. We are not smart enough to figure what role 'x' play in an organism, so it is not us, and is millions of years of evolution that has gone wrong, and it does not have a role, and removing 'x' should is ok. We have these (grossly powerless )"tests" to show that it is safe.
2. Forceful triggering of body's naturally suppressed behavior, which is also result of millions of years of evolution, should be ok, because we have seen that it is "safe" because we tested thousands of human beings, many weeks, and we could not find any apparent damage (as if we are smart enough to parametrize the a whole human beings, and hence can spot when a parameter is off)!
No, that kind of fear is another manifestation of the problem of not wanting to bother to figure out why things are they way they are, but maybe tempered with a little bit of experience that changing something you don't understand can cause serious problems.
IMHO, the real lesson of the parable is to figure out why things are the way they are, and then act.