How to handle the unintended consequences of your decisions?

Making critical decisions can lead you to unintended consequences. These are side-effects, outcomes of the decision made that was unintended. These different outcomes can be anticipated but not always be planned for. These side-effects can be positive, negative, or neutral.

No critical decision will ever have a single consequence.

Most of the unintended consequences appear from different directions and over time. Handling them may be necessary if they are negatively distorting your desired outcome. Since critical decisions are nothing more than a probability problem, unintended consequences might not be entirely possible in a preventive or near real-time manner.

Let’s take the example of an IT system upgrade. Rolling out significant new system enhancements hardly happens without testing; however, bugs or configuration issues regularly surface post-release despite testing. Rapid releases and patches are rolled in quick successions to mitigate the impact. Hence, with every major update, you will see a sequence of follow on patches being rolled out to tweak and manage the unintended consequence.

Unintended consequences can be managed better with the following measures:

• Staggered Rollout: Many rollout contexts, like rolling major software, policy, medicine, etc., provide an opportunity to be rolled out in phases. This staggered rollout approach by design is a useful strategy to employ when stakes are too high.
• Plan for it: With critical decisions, it is better to assume unintended consequences will occur rather than considering the other way around. You can tweak your resourcing strategy to cover scenarios where immediate and urgent course correction may be needed based on something unexpected.
• Increase Agility: Adapt as you rollout and calibrate to change and refine your decision. Iteratively improving and rolling out will increase the probability of a better outcome and ensure limited exposure towards unwarranted consequences.
• Revisit your decision-tree: Unintended consequences should be used to revisit your decision tree and enhance it to cover these scenarios to recalibrate better and refine strategy.

Now let’s turn our attention towards softer aspects in handling unintended consequences.

• Most critical decisions in an organizational context are discussed and deliberated as a group. While the group may decide in a particular way, it is also prone to group thinking and therefore, its perils. Hence, a leader must be willing to debate and refine his/her views in the group but not get carried away with the group. Own your decision, and own the unintended consequences.
• Define and refine the unintended consequence. Once a side effect has occurred, then use that as an opportunity to clearly and directly understand the outcome and its potential causes. A consistent understanding in the team is critical to ensure you engage the concerned section in accounting and mitigate any subsequent negative impact.
• Improve, do not penalize. Assess if the side effect is something that could have been assessed before during the risk assessment stage. If not, then use these side effects as an opportunity to remove blind spots in the decision-making process and improve it further.

In the end, fixing unintended negative consequences may or may not be in your control ultimately. But being flexible and managing exposure could help in reducing the probability of encountering severe decision errors.

Picture: Unsplash — Adam Nieścioruk