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Hello everyone, here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast. Imagine a road in the middle of the countryside. Across this road, there is a fence. It does not seem to make any sense. There are no animals nearby, no house, no sign. Someone walks by and says: "This fence is useless. Let's take it down."
And another person, a wiser one, answers something like this: "If you do not know what it is for, I will not let you remove it. First, go and find out why it is here. Then we can talk." This short story was told by the English writer G. K. Chesterton almost one hundred years ago, and it became known as Chesterton's Fence. And I think it has never been more relevant for those of us who work with projects. Today everyone wants to simplify. Less bureaucracy, fewer approvals, fewer documents, fewer meetings. And I agree with a lot of this. Many organizations have piled up layers of control that slow everything down and protect nobody. But there is a trap here. Simplifying without understanding is not agility. It is a gamble. Think about a transformation project that decides to remove an approval step in purchasing.
Nobody remembers why it exists. It delays every order by one week. So it goes away, and everyone celebrates. Now imagine that, six months later, the company finds out that this approval was created years ago, after a serious problem with a supplier. That step was not there because of bureaucracy. It was the scar of an old wound. And when we remove the scar without understanding the wound, the wound comes back. In projects that go into crisis, this happens often: the control that was cut to gain speed becomes the exact door the problem walks through.
This does not mean that every old rule is good. On the contrary. Many fences are there only because of habit, because of fear, or because someone forgot to remove them. Those need to go, and the sooner, the better. The question is not whether to keep or remove. The question is whether we know what we are removing. So, how do we bring Chesterton's Fence into our daily work? I see four simple steps. The first is to ask who created that process, and why.
Many times, a fifteen-minute conversation with someone who has been in the company longer is enough. Other times, the answer is in an old audit report, in a contract, or in a lesson learned that nobody read. The second step is to find out which risk that fence was holding back. Every control exists to protect us from something. If the risk still exists, we need another way to deal with it before we take the fence down. If the risk is gone, great, we can remove it with peace of mind. The third step is for when we cannot find the answer.
In this case, we need to remove the fence in a way that we can undo. We run a pilot in one area, for a period of time, and we watch what happens. This is very different from ending a control across the whole company on a Monday morning. The fourth step is the one I find the most beautiful in this story. We need to write down why our own fences exist. A few years from now, someone will look at the rules we create today and think they are useless. If we leave the reason written down, that person will be able to decide better than we did. A good process is not the one that lasts forever. It is the one that explains why it exists. There is one more thing I want to say.
Chesterton's Fence also applies to other people's decisions. When we take over a project in the middle of the way, it is very tempting to think that the previous team did everything wrong. The schedule makes no sense, the architecture looks strange, the contract seems badly written. Sometimes this is true. But many times, those decisions were made under constraints we do not know about. A budget cut, an imposed deadline, a supplier that walked away halfway through.
A little humility before judging saves a lot of rework, and it often keeps us from repeating the same mistakes. So I leave you with a challenge for this week. Before you remove anything in your project, ask one single question: why is this here? If the answer is "I don't know," it is not yet time to tear down the fence. It is time to talk.
I hope you enjoyed this episode, and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
