The 21st century has created a whole range of new types of professional that we have never had before – or if not quite new, at least newly repackaged. The world has always had influential people, for instance, but only now do we have people who put ‘Influencer’ on their tax return. Likewise, the corporate world has certainly known its fair share of disruption, yet it is only in the last couple of decades that the ‘Disruptor’ has become a recognisable figure in the way we talk about, and mythologise, big business.
In an earlier era, the Disruptor would have been called an Innovator. Yet while an Innovator creates something new, the Disruptor is defined at least as much by what they destroy as by what they create. Their dominant virtue is a brash disrespect of the status quo. Old ways of doing things are swept away, as is anyone so attached to those old ways as to be unable to adapt. The Disruptor imposes change; the clean-up is somebody else’s problem. It all sounds very exciting. It’s an attitude best summed up in Facebook’s now-abandoned internal company motto: “Move fast and break things.”
Again, this isn’t really new. The idea of ‘disruptive innovation’ has in fact been circulating in management speak since the mid-1990s, and critiques of the mindset are even older. In fact, all the way back in 1929, the English writer G.K. Chesterton diagnosed the core problem with moving fast and breaking things, via a thought experiment that has become known as ‘Chesterton’s Fence.’
Imagine there is some structure, let’s say a fence, erected along a road. Presumably it’s been there a long time, and was put there for some purpose. But that purpose, whatever it was, has been long forgotten. To us, now, the fence seems to be nothing but an impediment. Why not remove it? Won’t life be better if we simply tear it out?
Here is where Chesterton offers his “plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox.” When confronted with such a fence, Chesterton thinks the fact we can’t see the point of the fence is why we should not tear it down:
“The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”
In other words, you can only go ahead and do the disruptive thing if you know why you shouldn’t. Some fences keep foxes out of henhouses, for instance. If you think you can do without the fence because you’ve never seen a fox, consider if the existence of the fence is precisely why you’ve never seen one.
Of course, the fence is not really a fence. (The fox example, for instance, is a pretty neat analogy for diseases made scarce by vaccination). Chesterton, a conservative at heart, was arguing for caution in reforming laws and institutions – long-standing features of the social, political, and economic landscape that, over time, may have come to seem arcane, pointless, or counterproductive.
The principle has more everyday uses than politics, however. Chesterton’s Fence is often invoked by software designers, who not infrequently find themselves looking at old code and wondering why on earth anyone would make the baffling choices their predecessors did. It’s only when they take out these seemingly pointless fragments left behind by someone in the past that they discover that the code has been quietly preventing larger problems all along. Managers, too, are often warned to avoid changing policies or procedures without knowing how they came to be the way they are.
Importantly, Chesterton is not saying that things can never be reformed. His is a precautionary principle rather than an outright prohibition. We could rephrase it like this: understand the wisdom embodied in past decisions before you reject them. If you think something has been done in an awkward or weird way, stop and ask why on earth someone would choose to do such a thing. The mere fact we don’t immediately understand those decisions isn’t a good enough reason to assume our forebears were foolish or incompetent.
At the heart of this is a virtue of epistemic humility. People in the past were no less intelligent or ingenious than we are when it comes to solving problems, even if they lacked all the means or information available to us. Refusing to see this is how we get beliefs like ‘aliens must have built the pyramids,’ rather than acknowledging that ancient people might have been good at solving engineering problems relevant to their own contexts and with the tools at their disposal. It’s also how we get Disruptors who seemingly reinvent the wheel, or cause larger problems than the ones they claim to solve. If you move fast and break things, remember some breakable things turn out to be load-bearing.
But herein lies a dilemma. Bad ideas or unjust practices often do persist simply because nobody thinks to question them. At other times they persist because it’s in someone’s interest that they do, while being against the interests of others. If we’re too impetuous and over-eager for reform, as Chesterton warns us, we can end up ripping out things we don’t yet realise we rely upon. But deference to tradition or uncritical loyalty to the ‘way things are done’ can also encourage inertia and complacency, and rob us of the possibility of better days. Some things need to be broken.
So how do we know when to disrupt and when to leave things be? This is a task of what the Greeks called phronesis – practical wisdom. It is wise to ask why that fence is there, and wise to know what you’ll be risking by taking it out. Socrates declared he could only make sense of the oracle at Delphi declaring him the wisest man in Athens by reflecting that he at least knew he was ignorant, unlike all the other fools in town. Chesterton’s Fence implies a similar claim: to be wise is to stop and ask yourself what you’re missing.
The problem is that phronesis isn’t a set of rules or principles you can apply in advance. The Greeks didn’t see phronesis as a sort of algorithm or flowchart you can use to work out when to act one way or the other. Practical wisdom is as much a way of perceiving the world and knowing how to apply broad or vague principles to specific concrete situations. It’s the wisdom of the craftsperson who simply sees what needs to be done and how to intervene. There’s no checklist for wisdom, only years of experience and the memory of good decisions – and the weight of bad ones – to apply to the novel situation in front of you.
That adds another complication: we, too, are building our own fences every time we do this. We’re adding to the stock of decisions that seem sensible now but will be unclear or inscrutable to those who come after us. What strikes us as self-evident at one time will look opaque or even backward later on. Perhaps one day people of the far future will look upon our works and despair – at our silliness.
What wisdom requires, then, is not the fearlessness of the Disruptor, but the humility to stop and ask questions, and to know that our own perspective is neither uniquely privileged nor omnipotent. Disruption can be a force for good. It can also just leave a big mess. Wisdom is the ability to work out which messes are worth avoiding – because however impressively fast you move, some things can’t be easily unbroken.
