Respecting Chesterton’s Fence

I have written about this before, but in the past couple of weeks, I haven’t stopped thinking about humility in knowing what you know and what you don’t know.

Specifically, it makes sense to know the organization you’re working with before you change it. The structure in place may seem sclerotic and nonsensical, but oftentimes, there was a reason that thing was put in place to begin with.

This concept is known as “Chesterton’s Fence.” Though I have only learned about the name recently, I invented the concept by watching leaders come in and disrupt things without knowing what levers they were pulling on the interrelated, dynamic system they were encountering.

This concept is broadly applicable. Don’t delete lines of code if you don’t know what they do; don’t remove the policy that has been working. It’s also true on a personal level. There’s a lot of danger to the self and society if someone stops taking their medicines. You feel better, so you stop, but the very thing that was making you feel better was the medicine!

Respecting Chesterton’s Fence is a fundamentally conservative act because it respects the wisdom, knowledge, and experience of the people who came before us. It is also important because these fences are hard to build. You will see that a program or law that took years of effort and sacrifice to build is much harder to make things in this world than it is to destroy them.