Why Unintended Consequences Are Important

I was reading the 8th book in the Wheel of Time Series, and to my surprise one of the characters mentions The Law of Unintended Consequences. She advises a protégé that “whether or not what you do has the effect you want, it will have three at least you never expected, and one of those usually unpleasant“. This idea is something I encountered in my executive Doctor of Business Administration class as students noted that many academic papers oversimplify organizational phenomena. Those papers focus on a limited number of intended outcomes and fail to consider unintended consequences that are, as the fictional character notes, unpleasant. This is why unintended consequences are important.

Why Unintended Consequences Are Important

In business and other walks of life we often plan to do things to achieve a particular goal. Often our actions are successful, but there is almost always a cost. There are some unanticipated effects that occurred, which can be a mix of the good and the bad. In my organizational climate and culture class, for example, one student noted that if you put greater emphasis on safety climate at work, likely employees will work slower. Thus there can be a tradeoff between safety and productivity. As a general principle, any time you put emphasis on one type of behavior, people are likely to do more of that and less of something else.

Some unintended consequences are foreseeable, but more often than not they are not. This is because you can’t always anticipate how other people will respond to an action that affects them. Implement a new policy at work, and you can’t be sure that people will respond positively. It might meet with resistance that has negative consequences.

Managing Unintended Consequences

Organizations are complex systems with many moving parts. No amount of prior planning can anticipate all the effects changing one part of the system will have. It takes effort to manage change and its unintended consequences. A few suggestions.

• Be Evidence-Based. If research has been done on the actions you wish to take, you might find information on intended (did the action have intended effects) and unintended consequences (what didn’t work as planned).
• Be Thorough in Planning. Think through all the steps in implementing an action. Too often managers feel that all they need to do is write a policy and put it online. More time should be spent on implementing than on crafting the policy itself. How will you let everyone know about it? How will you enforce it? What will you do if people fail to adopt it?
• Evaluate Effects. Collect information about how well the action is working and what all the consequences have been. This can be done by conducting surveys, holding focus groups, or just walking around and talking to people.
• Remain Flexible. Be prepared to tweak what you have done in minor or even major ways. This goes hand-in-hand with evaluation. Some of the most effective organizational changes use an “action research” approach by going through a series of cycles of change, evaluate, tweak the change, evaluate.

A major part of a manager’s job is to take actions to achieve organizational goals. These can be small things that might only affect one or two people, or they can be organization-wide actions designed to make major changes. Regardless of the scope, there can be unintended consequences that are not foreseeable. A good manager is not someone who can anticipate these consequences, but is someone who has the flexibility to respond and fix the problems that making a change invariably creates.

Photo by Tim Clark from Pexels. Photo of an Edsel that is noted as one of the biggest product failures in automotive history.

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