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Don't destroy what you don't understand!
In short, this is what a simple rule called “Chesterton's Fence” advises, which says that you should never destroy something, change a rule or a tradition if you do not understand why it was created.
It is, in a sense, a call to humility to criticize and reform everything from policies or institutions to family customs, work protocols, or lines of code in computer programs.
This theory highlights that if one does not fully understand what is happening, the consequences of a hasty action can end up being much worse than those intended to be repaired.
This fence thing may seem strange, but it is so called because the idea was illustrated by the person who made it famous: the English writer and philosopher Gilbert Keith Chesterton (18741936).
Chesterton was an “obese giant,” as Jorge Luis Borges described him in the prologue to the story “The Eye of Apollo” from the book “The Library of Babel.”
The Argentine writer said he was “a friendly and affable man” who “could have been Kafka or Poe, but he courageously chose happiness or pretended to have found it.”
He described Chesterton's critical writings as charming and haunting and said that his early novels combined “the mystical with the fantastic”.
But the works that made the biggest impression were about 50 short stories about a detective who was a seemingly naive but psychologically astute priest named Father Brown.
“Literature is one of the forms of happiness; Perhaps no writer has given me as many happy hours as Chesterton,” wrote Borges.
When he was not writing or later giving interviews for the BBC, he enjoyed debating and often engaged in friendly public arguments with intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and Bertrand Russell.
Or played with them.
He once said to Shaw, “If they saw you, everyone would think that England was hit by a famine,” to which Shaw replied, “If they saw you, everyone would think that you caused the famine.”
But one thing he took very seriously was religion.
“From the Anglican faith he moved to the Catholic faith, which he said was based on common sense,” Borges said.
“He argued that the strangeness of this belief fits the strangeness of the universe, just as the strange shape of a key fits the strange shape of the lock.”
Accurately and interestingly, this was taken from a book called The Matter: Why I am Catholic (1929), in Portuguese something like The Subject: Why I am Catholic, in which he talked about the fence that bears his name.
Reform without deforming
He explained that there is “a clear and simple principle when it comes to reforming things rather than deforming them.”
He suggested “for convenience, imagine a fence or gate erected along a path.”
“The more modern type of builder comes in happily and says, ‘I don’t see any use in this; let’s tear it down.'”
“To this the most intelligent builder would do well to reply: 'If you do not see the benefit of this, I will not let you remove it under any circumstances. Walk away and think. Then if you can come back…' Tell me you see the benefit of this, I can allow you to do this.”
The idea is that only when you know the purpose of something can you decide whether something is still necessary, whether it should be changed or simply left out.
According to Chesterton, this principle is based on the most basic common sense.
“The fence didn’t grow there. It was not created by sleepwalkers who built it in their sleep.”
“Someone had reason to believe this would be good for someone. And until we know what the reason was, we can’t really judge whether it was sensible.”
And he warned: “If we are not sure, it is very likely that we will miss a whole aspect of the problem.”
The fence, for example, even if it were in poor condition and small, could separate the cows from the sheep, philosopher Jonny Thomson imagined in Big Think.
Sheep tear up the grass almost by the roots when they eat it, while cows need tall grass to eat with their prehensile tongue. Shortly after the fence was removed, the cows would be malnourished and hungry.
From refreshments to sparrows
Although Chesterton defended the analysis of decisions that implied change in this way because he tended to be conservative, the principle continues to resonate in various areas, from the personal to the political.
For example, when we try to change bad habits, we often forget that they don't appear out of nowhere: they usually develop to satisfy an unmet need.
If this aspect is not taken into account, even if a habit is eliminated, it can be replaced by another, more harmful one.
At the corporate level, in what is considered a classic post, entrepreneur Steve Blank gave an example he has seen startups grow and hire finance directors.
In an attempt to cut costs and show off they often choose to forego company details for their employees, such as: E.g., free soft drinks and snacks as they see them as a useless expense.
In Blank's experience, the result is always the same: For the employees who helped the company grow, it feels like a sign of a change in the company culture, even if they can afford the sodas.
And that can lead to the most talented people leaving because suddenly everything feels very corporate and not what it used to be.
Examples like this are many, including one extremely tragic: the eradication of sparrows in China as part of the Four Plagues campaign of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward project (1958 to 1962).
Since sparrows were suspected of stealing grain from the fields, millions of Chinese did everything they could to eliminate them with success: the sparrow population was brought to the brink of extinction.
The locust plague, on the other hand, grew rapidly without sparrows to control it and became one of the triggers of the Great Chinese Famine, one of the greatest manmade disasters in history.
From this perspective, Chesterton's fence looks like a mechanism to avoid the law of unintended consequences.
The principle provokes and attempts to curb the excessive enthusiasm of reformers.
But it can also be used for the opposite.
Reforms, large or small, always have a force working against them: resistance to change.
For example, an organization can easily become unnecessarily complex and no longer fit the purpose. But the longer it exists, the less likely it is to be reformed or abolished.
In these cases, it is advisable to behave like the “smart builder” and therefore have valid arguments to prove exactly why it has become useless.
But sometimes you can't afford to secondguess every decision, no matter how much you want to. So perhaps it's worth pointing to Alexander the Great rather than Chesterton.
Legend has it that when Alexander conquered Phrygia, he was asked to untie the Gordian knot, which was so complicated that an oracle proclaimed that whoever could untie it would be destined to rule over all of Asia.
Alexandre tried for a while until he got tired. He declared that it didn't matter how he achieved this, so he drew his sword and struck with one blow.
It is important to know whether it is a fence or a knot.
Sometimes yes sometimes no
There are certain strategies that can serve as a guide in these cases.
Those who work in computing, as in Alexander the Great's strategy, sometimes use the socalled scream test, which they apply to products, services or capabilities that are active but no one is using.
It's simple: take it out and wait to see if anyone screams. If this happens, install it again.
It's a case that could fall under the Type 2 decisions described by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in a letter to shareholders that many use as a reference to distinguish between closure or node options.
But he was talking about doors.
There's only one way: once you cross it, it closes behind your back and won't open again.
Another is bidirectional: you can enter and exit it.
“Some decisions have consequences and are irreversible or nearly irreversible (oneway streets) and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully and slowly, with great deliberation and deliberation.”
“If you go through and don't like what you see on the other side, you won't be able to get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions.”
“But with most decisions this is not the case: they are changeable, reversible, they are twoway doors.”
“If you made a suboptimal decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for so long. You can open the door again and come back.”
“Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by individuals or small groups using common sense.”
Are you planning a renovation or do you want to solve an easily reversible problem?
Then you could make quick changes with incomplete information and see what happens.
If it is irreversible, it is advisable to collect information, even if the process is slow and costly.
Chesterton would have agreed with this kind of caution before making the decision.