Act like an adult: The truth behind unintended consequences

Oh grow up! Because if you don't think about the long-term implications of your actions, quality will never take hold.

Maybe you have noticed lately that a new phrase is sliding into the American business vocabulary. "Unintended consequences" is being connected to the complexity of the world and its sneakiness.

The operating assumption behind the concept of unintended consequences is simple: we do something that has perceived immediate benefits and later it comes back to bite us with longterm negative and unpredicted consequences.When the United States led the NATO attack on Serbia, the immediate consequences planned for were to guarantee the protection and safety of Kosovo Albanians. As we look back at that action it is clear there were consequences far beyond the original goals.

None of these consequences were discussed by the U.S. government or media before the engagement. Instead, these consequences were reported after the fact and labeled "unintended."

All of us have experienced consequences-it is easy to accept them as just the way life unfolds. But simply accepting them is wrong. Most unintended consequences are mislabeled. Better they should be called "unanticipated consequences."

When I first began my studies in the field of the future, Arthur Harkins, head of the University of Minnesota's Futures Studies Department, was a major influence. I have never forgotten something he cautioned us about during my first year of study: "We must be careful what we choose to learn inductively." Basically, Harkins was suggesting that human beings have become so powerful that many of our experiments do substantial damage to our world before we realize it.

What Harkins was driving at is this: we have a new responsibility as the most powerful species on this planet.

For our pioneer-wild-west, just-- do-it U.S. culture, this is a new skill and a new requirement for us-and they flow across cultures, industries, and disciplines.

Of course, what Harkins is asking for seems impossible. It is like trying to predict the course of the future. Yet what we have to understand is that many consequences are identifiable and have a high likelihood of happening. Once you have identified that likelihood, you can do something about it.

Two categories of consequences are especially important to anticipate:

1) Unlikely positive consequences. Ifyou can identify these kinds of consequences well in advance, then you can work to increase the likelihood oftheir happening. in doing this, you improve your chances of gaining their benefits.

2) Likely negative consequences. Ifyou don't do something, you are automatically on a pathway toward a lot of damage.

When talking to companies about how they attempt to anticipate consequences, you are presented with different approaches, Most of them, boiled down, involve brainstorming: "Let's think of all the ways this new idea could be beneficial for us and all the ways it could cause us harm." There is also monitoring, which involves watching the idea unfold and trying to sense if anything surprising was also unfolding.

These approaches are primitive at best and usually do not uncover the most important implications and consequences. There is another way of driving the discussion, using a methodology: uncover both short- and long-term implications using the Implications Wheel (see diagram). What this pattern does best is to create a pattern of dialogue that dramatically enhances the likelihood of identifying specific important positive and negative consequences and the pathways by which they happen.

In the simplest sense, the wheel pattern answers; "What the heck are we getting ourselves into?"

At first glance, the wheel looks terribly complex. But when creating one, you quickly discover that it is based on a very simple fractal pattern that repeats until the final look of the wheel is one of many elements of a highly articulated structure. Once you understand it, it is very simple.

"Unintended" consequences are actually "unanticipated" consequences. They could have been discovered if someone had taken the time and had a process to discover them. And once discovered, something could have been done before it was too late.

So here is the paradox. just about the time we think we can do nearly anything we want, we shouldn't. We must now begin a new discipline, one that mandates that we think about the long-term implications of our actions before we embark on them.

Is this difficult? Sure, initially. But so was the quality movement. Remember all the naysayers who laughed at the idea of total quality and continuous improvement and Six Sigma? Remember how they told us what a waste of time and resources it would be?

It will be the same pattern for this new responsibility of discerning the long-term consequences of our behaviors. In a very real sense, this behavior is the behavior of an adult. And maybe that means, we, as a species, are now coming into our adulthood. If that is true, then our more mature behavior can only make it easier to build and maintain a world of quality.

Joel Barker, an independent scholar and futurist, and author of The Future Edge (William Morrow & Co., 1992), is known for popularizing paradigm shifts

and his best-selling videos. Barker may be reached at 651-228-0103 or visit www.JoelBarker. com. Barker will be a presenter at AQPs Performance 2001.

Copyright Association for Quality and Participation Jan/Feb 2000
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