“We have to close the gate, because you always leave things as you found them.”
I must have been eight or nine years old, and we was headed to “the ranch”—a dude ranch in southern Arizona that my family had been vacationing at for going on four generations. The road to the ranch was a bumpy dirt road off the highway choked with mesquite, which wended in and out of arroyos for some eight miles. A milestone in the long drive was a small corral bisected by the road, and you needed to get in and out of your car to open and close the gates on either side.
I remember questioning the reason for it—why couldn’t we just leave the gate open? why did it need to be closed?—and my dad trotted out old adage about “leaving things as you found them.”
The adage recently came to mind when I encountered what you might consider its “extended” version: a model of “second-order thinking” (considering the consequences of consequences) developed by English polymath G.K. Chesterton, which is popularly known as “Chesterton’s Fence”:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution as 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.”
The reasoning is straightforward enough: avoid making changes until you understand the existing state of affairs.
The example of Chesterton’s Fence that I wrestle with on a more or less weekly basis is the organization of folders on my company’s shared server. Confronted with a folder structure that seems confusing, the voice of the “more modern type of reformer” is the first one I hear: Move that file! Change that folder name! until the second reformer cuts in: What will happen to your InDesign links? And will your colleague know that “Awards” now lives under “PR”?
It can result, as Chesterton points out, in a bit of a paradoxical situation. Is there room for improvement? Do I actually understand the current state of affairs? Or will my attempts at improvement actually worsen things?
The resulting paralysis isn’t a great outcome either. Often enough, a folder structure is just as disorganized and unintentional as it appeared at first glance. It would be a rare occurrence for someone to built a fence across a road for no particular reason. But to create a new top-level folder with an unrelated folder structure for no particular reason? That’s easy enough to imagine.
Taylor Coe 