Think through second order consequences and document them

Hamlet reminds us that what makes humans special is our ability to see “before and after”:

What is a man

If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and godlike reason

To fust in us unused.

And this is the core of how you separate yourself from Everyone Else: you can see before, and after. That is, you can think. Today, we’re going to focus on the “after” component of this.

Because you can see “after,” that is, think about and make predictions on what will likely happen—you have a particularly useful, and particularly underused, skill. This skill being that you can plan events based on what you expect the other parties to do, or not do.

At one level, you know this. You know that if “green toenails” is a trigger-word around someone, you won’t use that word in front of them unless you want to trigger them on purpose! But this becomes powerful in two ways.

First, you can put this into your planning, particularly personal planning for how you interact with your boss or client. Think about it this way, you want to tell him something difficult. If you tell it to him in a direct way, how is he likely to respond? Get angry at you? Okay, then don’t do it—unless you want him to get angry. Or maybe he’s more likely not to get into problem-solving mode? Okay, then do that—unless you don’t think it’s quite yet ready for problem-solving mode because he needs to be exposed to the problem in a more serious or deep way first to understand it.

The two uses of “unless” in the previous paragraph get to the key point here, which is the “second-order” consequences. Don’t just think through the likely behavior, but think a few steps ahead, about how he’s likely to respond and if you want that response, then what will likely happen, and so forth.

Doing this effectively is indistinguishable from magic, to paraphrase an old line about advanced technology.

Let’s think through another example of this. A colleague at your company is deeply, deeply incompetent, and causing substantial problems for the work delivery. But your boss or client just doesn’t see it.

You could just tell him, but that is unlikely to work. You could compile a list of complaints, and that’s a bit better, but it’s still unlikely to be effective.

But you can solve this in a few ways via second-order thinking. Here’s one:

What if you assign this incompetent person to own a task that is directly reportable to the boss, and you know he’ll drown doing it. Then the boss will see the incompetence for himself. Note the second-order thinking here: he is likely to do the work badly then the boss will likely see it himself since it’s being reported directly to him, then the boss will likely realize the incompetence directly, then the boss will be much more likely to fire him.

Do you see how this plans out a few events that you think will happen, that will help achieve your goal? Maybe a bit Machiavellian, but Machiavelli is underrated when used in the best interest of the mission! Also note that there’s a logical chain you can build around this: you think there’s an 80% probability of the first event happening, and if it does then a 90% probability that the other person will respond in that particular way, which will then give you 75% chance that ultimately, he’ll decide to do this other thing. These all can be mathematically modeled. And the superpower version of this is to think through different scenarios, map out their associated probabilities at each step and your expected final outcome, then pursue the variation that makes the most sense. What’s limiting you is your strategic creativity, nothing more.