"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.”
– G. K. Chesterton
Stumbling upon[1] the concept of Chesterton's fence has provided a useful label for the approach to change management that I’d adopted in the weeks immediately following my return from parental leave to resume managing my team. According to Wikipedia,
<aside> 📚 Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
</aside>
Essentially, don’t try to remove a fence without first understanding what it is meant to protect (or restrain). As I’ve been reintegrating, I’ve worked to identify the changes in the team and discern between the healthy adaptations to keep, temporary stop-gaps to revert, and regressions to repair that have emerged in my absence. In other words, I’ve been looking for the fences.
To that end, here are a few of the types of questions that I’ve asked my direct reports and colleagues to gauge the changes and their impact:
Although I shared some of these questions as thought prompts beforehand, the emphasis was on delving deeper in one-on-one conversations and team health forums.
An example of how this played out was in recognizing that the meeting load on Thursdays had become unsustainable. There were several meetings that had expanded to have overlapping scope and unclear attendance policies. This caused high fatigue and a general reduction in the effectiveness of each forum as the value of each was unclear. It was tempting to come in and start canceling meetings because who doesn’t want fewer meetings! However, using team health processes such as retros and one-on-ones to gather input, I was able to first validate my observations, get a sense of what folks were hoping to get out of the forums, and understand where that wasn’t happening.