Understanding the Laws of Unintended Consequences

A World of Planned and Unplanned Actions, and Consequences

Newton said that Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

And Murphy said, That which can go wrong WILL go wrong.

And someone once commented, Murphy was an optimist.

But as I have seen throughout my life, every action has the likelihood, if not the reasonable certainty, of Unintended Consequences which are inherently Uncertain in their nature or occurrence.

Even predictable things that should have gone right didn’t, and things that should have gone wrong didn’t. And some things that have gone right have gone right beyond expectation, while some negative events have taken on a life of their own and amplified the negative consequences of their occurrence. It is a matter of timing, alignment of other factors, peoples’ actions and reactions, and many other items. Trigger events -- the action or event that triggers the intended or unintended consequences, can be minor -- even a word or two heard and taken out of context.

I was once thrust into damage control on a project after someone on the team overheard a part of a hallway conversation, took it totally out of context, and started negative rumors about the project that had immediate negative impacts. I’m sure you have had similar situations. It was rapidly resolved, but taught many lessons at one time.

People use the term or phrase Unintended Consequences often, but there really is no set standard for what that means, at least none that I have found

On the one hand it is self-explanatory: an Unintended Consequence(s) is/are the result of an event or action, where that specific result was not considered or anticipated, hence it was unintended. For example:

Side effects of drugs are Unintended Consequences. (We hope.) While these are often uncovered during clinical trials, not every conceivable test can be conducted, and drug interactions are complex and vary from person to person.

Having your car stolen while you rush into a store to get a coffee for the AM rush, and leave the keys in the ignition … is an Unintended Consequence(s) (though a predictable event in our times).

Leaving home on time, but being late for work because of the school bus that was one minute early, followed by the traffic jam because of the broken down car, followed by the cross-street with a malfunctioning traffic light, and followed by getting caught in other rush hour traffic, followed by missing a meeting and getting dressed-down by the boss because you forgot your cell phone and couldn’t call to let him/her know what had happened … is a series (or chain) of events which are totally independent but they all happen in sequence to resulting that one Unintended Consequence … with the boss. And even that can trigger something else.

Before getting into my car, I tossed my sunglasses onto the passenger seat of my car and did not see that they bounced back into the driver’s seat. The freak angle at which they landed …my new sunglasses were a testament to the Laws.

We created the atom bomb to end a war and become a deterrent to future wars. Instead, we spent decades in an arms race costing untold billions of dollars and placed us in a mode of mutually assured destruction.

Large scale software products -- from applications to network products -- have become so functionally rich and complex that there is no way to test all the variations. So of course, as large scale enterprise implementations are done with thousands of users, all of the unknown problems surface, usually at various times, and some of them have serious Unintended Consequences.

With the advent of the move to cloud computing, big data, analytics, and both integrated and dis-integrated (meaning not integrated) systems now being composed from a range of Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings from a range of suppliers, the perception of cost efficiency and flexibility, agility, and adaptability may well mask the ever-increasing likelihood of data and interface inconsistencies than may (or will) occur as the various vendors move in different directions, and incur downstream costs in many ways you aren’t expecting. In an informal poll of a dozen CIOs/CTOs, not one of them -- NOT ONE OF THEM -- indicated they had paid any attention to this possibility, trusting the vendors’ responses instead. But after I raised this question, you could see these seasoned professionals starting to think about the issue, and the what if...

We live in a world of planned and unplanned actions and consequences. Sometimes those consequences are chain reactions, dominos falling after the first is toppled. Sometimes they stand alone, one-time events.

I don’t know how else to say it: one thing triggers something else which might or might not be good which … and somewhere, the consequences of those actions, acts, or events start to show themselves.

There is no single act that stands by itself.

If you think about that simple statement, you will realize how infinitesimal we all are in the universe. But even one individual can have significant impact on our own planet, in our own global society, in our own domestic/national environments, in our market segments, in our communities and in our lives and the lives of others we know and don’t know -- often without even knowing it. Doubt it? Look at Gandhi, Deming, King, and so many others who have led the way for positive actions and changes, and consider those who represented the other side of that coin. Look at those who have led the way in changing technology, and its use, value and role in our lives.

We can only be sure that what we do impacts us, for sure, for starters. Beyond that, some acts or decisions will affect, influence, or impact others. The extent of that impact may be predictable or not, but anything that you do that affects at least one other person affects yet others downstream. That is undeniable and immutable.

People in positions of power in government and industry of all forms have both direct and indirect power/influence over others, while the average citizen can wield far less influence except under unique circumstances. I call this the genesis stream affect, i.e., you were at the beginning of something that continued on (and on) sometimes playing itself out, and sometimes sustaining itself or morphing into something else. If you are recognized for your contribution, you can be lionized or villainized, based on what that contribution was. The same concept applies to business and government. It applies to all fields of endeavor from religion to philosophy to medicine to …

Sometimes the consequences are good, sometimes not. Sometimes they are intended, and sometimes not. Those people who champion positive causes are heard, and can rally like-minded people to their cause(s). But those who foment discord, promote anarchy, or publicly engage in negative acts with intended negative consequences seem to take center stage, and their negative acts sometimes have the greater weight or focus in our society.

Unintended Consequences also align heavily with risk both known and unknown, but there is no guarantee that the original precipitating event or action will or will not spawn Unintended Consequences, or in fact the Unintended Consequences will even match in scale and impact the action(s) that led to them. The scale, scope and impact of Unintended Consequences are the result of a confluence of other factors all in motion at the same time. Sometimes, as in wave mechanics/physics they amplify each other, sometimes they negate each other. But they will occur. You simply might not see them.

Additionally, risk amplifies the possibility, and even the potential severity (which is relative to the event) of Unintended Consequences. And this amplification does not need to be proportional to the original event or Consequence risk at all. This is where Murphy steps in.

For example, the first Space Shuttle did not launch because of a computer glitch, The Shuttle had three on-board computers co-processed information in parallel, and voted on the results. If one (or two) did not agree with the others, then it all came to a screeching halt.

That day, despite countless dry runs and checkouts, those computers disagreed. The Shuttle stayed on the pad.

It turns out that that some time earlier, a decision was made regarding the probability of that SPECIFIC situation. Decision? When the potential of that event occurring was addressed, that the computers could disagree on that specific item was identified, the decision was made NOT to implement software to deal with the infinitesimal chance that that one-in-one billion (1.6 billion to 1, actually) event could or would occur.

It was excellent analysis and software and systems engineering that identified the potential and its statistical probability was correct. The decision was valid. I would have said the same thing.

But it was my friend and neighbor who made that call to NOT implement the software.

So of course, that problem occurred. It HAD to occur. So what might have been a $5,000-10,000 piece of programming stopped a multi-billion dollar program cold in its tracks, and cost millions to remediate and resolve... the programming cost (small) PLUS all the other expenses associated with launching the shuttle (not small.)

Conversely, and this is sad and true, knowing what something is presents or offers no guarantee you can prevent something … which is an inherent attribute of the Laws relative to any system or system of systems, or pretty much anything really.

Example: the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed upon atmospheric re-entry on February 1, 2003. This was a national tragedy. Knowing and working with many people in NASA over the years, this was even more heartbreaking for me.

Some months later I was at a luncheon of NASA contractors, and the guest speaker was the (then) new Director of Safety for NASA. Around me were perhaps 200 wizened technical and marketing professionals in the NASA community. Columbia was mentioned, as was the Challenger tragedy, in quiet pre-lunch conversation.

All attendees had been affected one way or another.

When our speaker addressed us, he mentioned that the greater tragedy (my word) about Columbia was that different pieces of NASA had all the information which, if they had put it together, would have raised the flags relating to the pending problem that destroyed the shuttle and took the crews’ lives.

He went on to say:

"We know what we do know, we know what we don’t know, we don’t know what we don’t know, AND we sometimes we don’t know -- or share -- what we DO know."

NASA had acknowledged that the information was in house and basically held by different groups. Again, if they had put it together, if the groups had shared information, it would have triggered the flags relating to the pending problem that destroyed the shuttle and took the crew members’ lives. But internal protocols, stovepipes, and assumptions, got in the way of that sharing.

Because no Shuttle flight is 100% foolproof, and literally anything could go wrong, there is no guarantee that event would have happened or not … but not sharing what was known had the absolutely Unintended Consequences of one of our most tragic moments in the Space Program. It created greater risk than originally there, and arguably, put the shuttle on the direct path to that event.

But to appropriately book-end the Challenger tragedy, when the Shuttle Columbia blew up 70 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members, I was in Orlando, Florida meeting with Martin Marietta, specifically the group that had the major contract on the shuttle, and as it happened, specifically some people ON that project. You can imagine the devastation we all felt. I vividly remember the event, the news as given to us... the tears and pain in the room. I cannot forget it. Another Unintended Consequence.

In contrast, I met and was speaking with the head of the team leading the inquiry into why the tiles fell of the shuttle on its first mission.

This lady was brilliant and NO nonsense.

In conversation, she asked me academically/rhetorically, Do you know what the problem was? I looked at her and said that "Probably, the tiles were treated as appliqués and not a structural part of the shuttle, but that was just an off-the-top-of-my head thought."

Her jaw dropped open. She asked how I knew -- the report had literally just been issued within the hour and there was no general public distribution at that point. Gee, I said, it seemed obvious to me for no particular reason… which was the absolute truth. Now, I am no genius, but this just popped out as a logical response. I had discussed the tile failure with friends at NASA, but only from an it happened perspective, with no causal analysis attempted.

BUT LATER, it struck me that when I saw the shuttle tiles, and the tiles PEEL off, the image of a recessed tile ceiling popped in my head. Those tiles reinforce the stability of the ceiling, and were a part of the ceiling system, NOT appliqués.

A friend once put up an antique copper tile ceiling, part of which crashed down during dinner as we sat admiring it over wine. You connect the dots however you want. He put all this heavy copper on the ceiling and never bothered to reinforce the ceiling wallboard to the ceiling framing, did not have any supporting braces, and discounted the weight and sag … and the sag started about midway through his effort … he just didn’t pay attention to it. His wife called it to his attention and he said he would do something. Well he did. He ultimately replaced the ceiling and started from scratch, much wiser and out thousands of dollars for the repairs. We did finish the wine though dinner was under the ceiling tiles.

Was it an appropriate metaphor or analog for me? I had put up a recessed panel ceiling in my basement and often thought about how flimsy it seemed without the tiles, and how sturdy the thing was with the tiles -- the tiles actually reinforcing the stability as they locked into their recesses. Who knows what subconscious connection these had in my mind? But I had intuited an answer … and was (surprisingly) right. The tile mishap was the Unintended Consequence of a mischaracterization of that component of the Shuttle.

It’s strange how the mind works. I’m sure YOU can think back and find situations where you did the same thing.

Oversight, assumption, or simply not paying attention … the problem was recognized, the cause found, the problem resolved.

But the space shuttle is a complex system of systems, and as you will see in the section on complex system of systems, unintended consciences have increased likelihood of occurrence.

Our lives are full of decisions we make every day, and actions we take, from the moment we put our feet on the floor to the moment we go to sleep. But every day, things go on around us over which we have no control, little to no influence, and in the simple conduct of our jobs and life in general we do things that have results and consequences.

I once knowingly hired a person who was in substance abuse recovery. I hired him because I liked him, he had obvious and