#011 Order is Easier to Create Than Keep — The Time Deception

Continuing in the series as to why it is more difficult to maintain a heathy organization than it is to create it, we move on to reason #2. The time deception is captured in an ancient proverb in the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 8: “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil.” What this proverb means is that the longer the delay between action and consequence the greater the risk we do wrong things. 

Humans learn by doing and seeing what happens. A child puts things in its mouth and finds out what is good and what is not. Putting a lemon in gets an immediate reaction, putting in candy is pleasant, so you put more in. It’s not until later that you figure too much candy is not good.

One of the reasons it is difficult to sustain organization success is that as it grows there are more and more decisions being made that are dependent upon each other, but the consequences of those decisions is not fully understood yet. So, there is a compounding of potential error and subsequent chaos.

Principle

In periods of high-risk decision making sometimes it is better to slow down and see how one decision works out before making the next. This is the principle that the agile management model in software engineering is based upon –build something small and see how it works and then move to the next step.