Things have reasons
Toby: I read it, I think, 16 years ago. It was about El Salvador and he had it stricken from the record and there was a reason.
Will: What?
Toby: I don’t know, but things have reasons.
Will: Do they?
Toby: Yes, they do.
– The West Wing, Inauguration Part I
We might describe this as a Chesterton’s Fence sentiment. Chesterton’s Fence is the principle that one should not remove a fence until they understand why it was put there in the first place. This seamlessly generalizes to the idea that things should not be changed until you understand why they are the way they are. We can think of this as a generally status quo biasing principle.
In contrast, we have Admiral Grace Hopper’s maxim that, “The most dangerous phrase in the English language is ‘We’ve always done it this way’”. This expresses roughly the opposite sentiment, that the status quo does not deserve any particular deference, that the fact that something is the present (and even long held!) practice is not an argument in favor of continuing it.
There’s an inherent, common sense, appeal to both of these sentiments. It really does seem like generally good practice to understand why things are the way they are before you change them. And at the same time, it also seems like a mistake to keep doing something for no better reason than that’s how it’s always been done. And yet, these principles appear to be in tension (if not outright conflict). They can’t both be common sense!
In the remainder of this piece, I want to chart out a better way to put both of these into practice. However, I want to begin by saying, if you have to choose a bias, choose anti-status quo bias. The reason for this is that in every organization I’ve ever seen, there is a strong status quo bias. Moreover, if you do any sort of cost/benefit analysis of whether to make a change, the status quo always has a built in advantage: there’s no additional costs to adopting the status quo. Because the status quo always has a leg up, if you have to pick a bias, pick the one that forces you to go against the grain.
If I asked you from first principles, what should your methodology for deciding whether to make a change or not be, you would say something like: I find the strongest arguments in favor of making a change, and the strongest arguments in favor of keeping things as they are, and then I weigh those and make a decision. This is in fact not really how people make decisions, but it’s also clearly the correct answer as to what we should be aspiring to.
In this decision making framework, the reason we should care about Chesterton’s Fence is that part of finding the best arguments for the status quo are finding the arguments that produced it. They may or may not be good arguments, we’ll have to evaluate them on the merits, but we can’t honestly say we weighed the evidence if we didn’t go out and find the motivations that led to this decision in the first instance. However, at the same time, we cannot simply treat “it is the status quo” as an argument in favor of it. A particularly rigorous thinker would probably tell us that “that’s the way we’ve always done it” is actually just shorthand for “the status quo is inevitably adapted to a large number of circumstances that are not necessarily visible, and we should give deference to that evolutionary process”. This is much more intellectually rigorous, but it still has a major flaw.
If you don’t go out and find the reason Mr. Chesterton put up his fence, you’ll probably be inclined to think its for a good reason. You may even be inclined to think yesterday’s good reason is still true today. But if you go out and find the reason, you may discover that your assumptions aren’t quite right. My experience in going out and finding the reasons for fences is that while you do learn some important things, a lot of times what you find out is: The fence was there to deter the neighbor’s dog (it has been 15 years since that neighbor lived here), the fence was required by a city ordinance (the ordinance was repealed), the owner thought the fence looked nice (do you?), etc. The reasons for the fence are historical, idiosyncratic, or my personal favorite, path dependent (the fence is there to stop the dogs after they got out of the cat door, and we can’t remove the cat door because of a lumber shortage, and on and on). Once you have the reasons for the fence, you can weigh them appropriately.
It’s a mistake to make changes without understanding why things are the way they are, because that often means making changes from a place of ignorance. But its also a mistake to elevate past decision makers to omniscient status, assuming their unknown motivations are powerful and eternal. Either mistake can and will lead to bad decisions, as attractive as appeals to either Mr. Chesterton’s Fence or Admiral Hopper’s wisdom may be. In the end, the need to collect the evidence, weigh it, and strive to make good decisions is the only path to reaching reliable conclusions.