IV. Adjacent Territory Essay 27
Then What?
Asking the second question, and then the third
You make a decision. A good one, carefully made, with reasons. Then somebody asks you what happens next, and you give the answer, and it is a satisfying answer, and they say thank you. And some weeks later you notice that the thing you decided has produced a consequence that you had not considered, and that the consequence has produced another one, and that the second one is the one that is actually expensive.
Almost nothing is that bad. Most decisions do what you expected. The interesting cases are the ones where the first consequence is obvious and the second one is not, and where the second one arrives late enough that it feels like a different subject.
There is a habit that catches most of these, and it consists of asking one question more times than feels necessary. And then what? Most people ask it once, comfortably, and get an answer. The second asking is what finds the cost, and the third is what finds the thing you would have to change instead.
Take a small shop that is doing well and decides to stock a product that has been selling fast for a supplier. First order: fine, it sells, they order more. And then what? They order enough to meet the demand, which means more of the shop's cash is sitting in stock, which means less cash for the other things that were selling well. And then what? The other products start to run out, because the supplier was the one who had been keeping the shelves full of something else too. And then what? Customers who came for that something else stop coming, and the shop has more stock than it ever had and less of the thing that was bringing people in.
Now notice where the chain turns. The first consequence is exactly what was intended: the product sells. The second consequence is a cash problem, which is a different subject and still manageable. The third is the one that matters, and it was not caused by the decision about the product. It was caused by the decision about the cash, which was made automatically, without a meeting, as a side effect of the first decision.
And here is the part that is easy to miss. The second-order question is not a question about the future. The shop can forecast the sales perfectly. The second-order question is about a different layer: not what will happen, but what will the happening cause, in a place you were not looking.
What the second question finds
There is a difference between a consequence and a second-order consequence, and the difference is about the level rather than the time.
A first-order consequence is another effect of the same action, at the same kind of level. The order comes in, more stock is bought, the shelf fills. A second-order consequence is an effect that acts on the arrangement rather than on the thing. The order comes in, and the shop's cash position changes, and the cash position was doing something else, and now that is changed too.
This is why the first step of a consequence is often entirely predictable and the second is not. Predicting the first step is predicting more of the same. Predicting the second step is predicting a change in a part of the system you were not thinking about, and you cannot predict it by thinking harder about the part you were thinking about. You have to look elsewhere.
There is a second thing the second question finds, and it is less technical. The first answer to "and then what" is the answer you arrived at when you made the decision. It was the reason you made it. Asking again, honestly, sometimes produces the same answer, and sometimes produces a different one, and when it produces a different one you have learned something about your own reasoning that you would not have learned any other way.
Where the cost hides
Most of the time, the second-order consequence of a decision is a cost that was already being paid and is now being paid more, or in a different place, or by a different person.
Consider the obvious case of making something faster. A workshop makes its work faster. First consequence: it is faster. Second consequence: the people downstream who were the bottleneck now have a queue in front of them, and the queue has moved rather than disappeared, and the person at the front of it is now the constraint. And then what? The workshop has spent money on speed and has not changed its throughput at all, and the constraint is now somewhere it did not used to be, and it is somewhere with less authority to fix it.
And the second-order consequence is very often borne by somebody who was not in the room when the decision was made. The decision to streamline a form makes the form faster for the person filling it in, and slower for the person at the other end who now has to deal with a great many more of them. The first consequence is a gain for one and a cost for another, and the second is the point at which the cost becomes visible to somebody who could change it.
What if you asked "and then what" twice on every decision for a month? Almost nothing would change about the decisions themselves, because most decisions are fine. What would change is the record. You would have a habit of noticing the place where the chain turns, and you would find that the turn is usually in a different part of the system from the one you were thinking about, and you would start looking there on purpose.
Now change the condition. What if you asked it a third time? This is where the exercise becomes strange and where it earns its keep. The third asking is the one that finds the thing you would have to change instead. And it is the one that most people skip, because by the third asking the answers have become abstract, and the abstraction feels like a failure of the exercise rather than the point of it.
"And then what is just negative thinking." It is not pessimism, it is completeness. A decision has consequences whether you look at them or not, and the ones you do not look at do not go away, they just go somewhere you did not check. The habit is not about expecting the worst. It is about noticing the parts of the situation you were not in the room for.
The other misconception: "you cannot keep asking and then what forever." You cannot, and the stopping rule is worth having. Stop when the answer is a decision you could take, or when the answer stops depending on the decision at all. If the answer to the next "and then what" would be the same whatever you had decided, you have reached the level where the decision does not matter, and you are done.
The stories people tell about consequences
It is worth saying that the habit of asking has a bad twin, because the bad twin is far more common and far more harmful than the good one is useful.
The bad twin is the story in which somebody did something a bit ordinary, and it went wrong, and the consequences compounded into something enormous, and the moral is that small acts have enormous effects. The story is usually told with a snake, or a chain of dominoes, and it is nearly always told about somebody else.
The difficulty with those stories is not that they are untrue. The difficulty is that they are unfalsifiable, they are told about people who are usually not the people telling them, and they have a way of making any ordinary act into a tragedy that could have been avoided, which flatters the teller and does nothing for anybody. It is a story about consequence with the prediction removed, and prediction is the part that would make it useful.
The version that is worth having is the ordinary one, in which somebody makes a reasonable decision, the second-order consequence is not what they expected, and the whole thing is a little sad but not a moral. Nobody has to be a villain. That is usually the actual shape of it, and it is more common and more useful than the version with a snake in it.
Limits
There is no end to the chain of consequences, and the question has to be bounded or it eats the day. Some decisions are genuinely small, and the honest answer to the second asking is the same as the first, and that is a useful answer, because it tells you to stop.
Second limit: you can be wrong about the first consequence. A habit of asking "and then what" does not make your predictions better, and if your model of the first step is wrong then the second step is a guess about a guess. The habit is only worth having where the first step is well understood, which is more often than people assume and less often than they hope.
Third limit: asking "and then what" is a way of thinking about consequences, and consequences are not the same as importance. Some very large consequences do not matter and some small ones are everything. The habit is a way of finding the things you have not thought about, and it does not tell you which of them to worry about. That is a different judgement, and it belongs to the level above the ladder.
Stuck
You are stuck with this habit when you are asking it instead of deciding. Every option comes with an infinite chain of consequences and you are still holding all of them, and the decision is still not made, and the asking has become a way of not choosing. The tell is that you have been asking for a long time and the list of consequences keeps growing rather than settling.
The way out is to timebox it and to decide which order to use. Ask the first "and then what" on the two or three consequences that matter most, and if none of them is a surprise, decide. If a second-order consequence is going to be genuinely important, it will show up in the first asking, because a second-order consequence that is a big deal usually shows itself as an unusual feeling about the first one. If the first answers feel ordinary, the second answers are probably ordinary too, and the chain is not the problem. The problem is that you have confused a thorough mind with a difficult decision.
Sources
- No specific story, incident, or chain of consequences is retold here. The discussion of the story in which a small act has enormous effects is offered as a general observation about how such stories are told, not as a criticism of any named example.
- The shop example is hypothetical, and no figures are given.
- The idea of consequences at different orders of explanation is used here in a general sense.