Tuesday, November 7, 2023

I’ve been thinking about Chesterton’s Fence.

If you’re not familiar, the concept starts like this: imagine you’re walking along a road and you come across a fence built across the road. You see no use for it, it leads nowhere, it prevents nothing. It’s just sitting there, being a fence.

For me it helps to place the walk in a forest, and out of nowhere I come across a short bit of fence, in the middle of the forest, in the middle of nowhere. Regardless of the scenario you choose, there is no immediately discernible reason for the fence to be there. You can’t see any purpose it serves. What do you do?

Essentially the underlying theory says there are two types of people. The first group will say “This fence serves no purpose! It should not be here, let’s take it down right away.” If you have young people in your life, this can sound familiar. If you’ve ever been a technologist, or been near them even briefly, you know all about this mindset. It is a very common reaction to a random, apparently useless short run of fence in the middle of a forest. It’s also reflective of first order thinking. If this/then that can be a short-hand way to describe first-order thinking. It considers an action and an immediate outcome from that action. There is a modern pull toward this type of thought, plus it has an added benefit of making the whole exercise look like productivity.

However, there is another type of response to that seemingly random and useless fence. The person who employs this type of thinking will instead push back on the “take it down right away” folks and say, “Wait a minute! I won’t allow you to clear any of that fence away until you completely understand why it is there in the first place.” Because, this kind of person thinks, “the fence isn’t here by accident. It neither grew up on its own nor was it constructed without planning and thought. Therefore, it is worth understanding its purpose, the ramifications of taking it down, and the ramifications of those ramifications.” That’s an example of second-order thinking. It values intentions and results over mere activity.

Second-order thinking has fallen out of vogue in most common day-to-day scenarios. It is easy to be seduced by the quick and “efficient” results of first-order thinking when you’re wanting to modernize, prove your worth, or when someone is trying to make a sale.

However, it’s second-order thinking that actually moves civilizations forward. It’s only by understanding what came before that we can truly improve upon it. It’s worth it to slow down, to stop and think, to embrace the realizations that stem from prior wisdom, that creates an environment where real growth is achieved.

Nature is full of this concept all around. The simplest example is the peacock. With those ridiculous looking and hard to maintain feathers. What good are they? And how much better life could he have without lugging them around? That’s the first-order question. So let’s remove them.

Trouble is? The peahens love them! They go crazy for them. And without those inefficient feathers, Mr. Peacock has no more generations of peacocks or peahens. But boy, did we sure save him a lot of trouble not having to drag around that plume.

Until next time,

Mary Schuster
Chief Knowledge Officer
October Research, LLC