People. Hell. Fences. (Buckle Up!)

This originally appeared on the now defunct interstitio blog on April 14th 2020. I recently posted something about Chesterton’s Fence, and I wrote this just after I had learned about it.

Once, a long time ago, in a country far far away, I spent the day in an emergency room, keeping a friend company while she was evaluated for, and ultimately diagnosed with, pneumonia.

As those that know me well know they can capitalize on the fact that I’ll do anything for a book or a coffee mug, she later gave me a copy of Sartre’s No Exit as a thank you for my support. This existential roller coaster of a book concludes with the punchline that “hell is other people.” (Something I’ve thought about a lot recently… Not sure why.)

As we all cope with the side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are faced with the brutal reality that there are other people, they are not us, and we co-exist with them on an oblate spheroid of finite extent. It’s a recipe for late night drinking.

The Fundamental Attribution Error

As part of our coping with this, we’re quick to throw others under-the-bus. Indeed, in psychology, this is called the Fundamental Attribution Error — or, as succinctly described in the linked wikipedia article, the tendency for people to “under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual's observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior.”

A good example of this concept in action might be if you cut into my lane on a busy highway. I choose to perceive this as “stupid” as opposed to assuming you were avoiding something I couldn’t see, inferring that you took this action because you’re out for me, devoid of compassion for my situation, and just generally an awful person.

In short, I do not take the time to think about your situation, or the fact that you’re most likely *more* like me than I choose to admit.

We tend to do this even when we don’t get to see something directly. For instance, let’s say you work in a large company, and you’ve been tasked with building out a new function for using people analytics as a way to improve how HR is run. As part of your due diligence in this task, you begin to understand who else in your organization is working on these things, what they’ve put in place to do this type of work, and you start to understand the important systems, structures, and processes in the context of your organization.

Many of these organizational processes will have been built by other people, in other contexts, at other times, and you may find yourself going, “Well, that’s dumb.”

Here is a great moment to take a beat, and start thinking about fences.

Specifically, one of G.K. Chesterton’s.

Chesterton’s Fence

If you’re not familiar with G.K. Chesterton, he was an accomplished and provocative polymath, and I remember very much enjoying his novel The Man Who Was Thursday (apparently his most popular). More to the point, Chesterton had a fence, which he describes in his own words here:

“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road.

The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’

To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”

— G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton, in all his 20th-century wisdom, is encouraging us to fight back against the Fundamental Attribution Error.

As we encounter systems, structures, and processes in our day-to-day, before we judge such things as unnecessary, outdated, broken, or “dumb,” we have to challenge ourselves to think about them within the context they might have been built.

In doing so, we remind ourselves that we’re no smarter (most likely) than the people who came before us, and they (most likely) acted in the best of intentions, using the (most likely) majority of the most pertinent (most likely) information they had to hand.

That’s a lot of most likelies! Indeed, each one represents an opportunity of positive assumption-making.

In doing so, we are ideally able to better understand the “fence,” and any subsequent modifications or alterations we make to it will be as impactful as possible.

The 21st Century Fence

This concept is especially important today, given our current environment of high uncertainty. This practice of second-order thinking is critical: we can’t just think about the consequences of our actions, we have to think about the consequences of our consequences.

It’s not nearly as hard as it sounds, and it’s really just a function of how much you can stop and think about others from an empathic perspective. It is something we all must do routinely, as we engage with customers, especially those who are looking to move into a new state (i.e. configuration of systems, structures, and processes), in service of a stated organizational goal they may need our help in achieving.