Humanity

Prigozhin and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Not really a law, but shit happens, right?

This story about the law of unintended consequences had been sitting in my drafts folder along with a couple of hundred others, slowly rising to the top of the pile.

Then recently a couple of Prigozhin clips came in and bingo! There they were, the last couple of highly illustrative examples I needed to round it off.

The law

Well, it’s not really a law is it, it’s just what happens when things happen that were not expected when a particular course of action is initiated?

In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen. The term was popularised in the twentieth century by American sociologist Robert K. Merton (Wikipedia). However, the idea can be trace back as far as John Locke and Adam Smith (the ‘Father’ of Economics).

To me, as an ex-project manager it’s just poor risk analysis when something unexpected happens. The formal process of predicting the possible outcomes of an action and mitigating them is called just that: Risk Management. It’s a common business and military practice.

In day-to-day life we tend to rely on heuristics — a fancy word for relying on practical experience or even superstition, such as don’t walk under a ladder (unspoken: because something might fall on you).

The ‘heuristic’ is: The devil is in the detail. So, make sure that you have considered the details or something will happen that has not been predicted or expected. Disaster could result, but occasionally the outcome may be positive.

Alternatively it may be known as Murphy’s Law. If something can go wrong, then it will.

In his novel ‘Four Fires’, Bryce Courtenay uses the metaphor ‘remove the spoon from the sink before turning the tap on’ for unexpected consequences. Think about it — you just don’t know where the water will go, do you?

Here are a few examples:

Finland joins NATO

Putin attacks Ukraine.

Unforeseen consequence: As a result of Putin attacking Ukraine because, he says, NATO was pushing eastward and threatening Russia, neutral Finland has now quickly joined NATO, with Sweden soon to follow.

Suddenly, Putin’s world is shrinking. His crazy move made the situation worse for him.

Ukraine now has one of the most capable armed forces in the world

Another illustration of the law. What was to be a 3 day special military operation is currently heading for 500 days.

Here’s Prigozhin ranting about it.

Russia blows the Khakovkha dam in Ukraine

This is believed to have been done by Russia to prevent an amphibious assault by Ukraine Armed Forces across the lower Dnieper River.

Unforeseen consequence: Russia’s first line of defence on the left bank was flooded and troops were trapped. Some commentators are of the opinion that Russian commanders expected this and sacrificed their positions to free up reserves for defensive use further east. Now of course, the reservoir is empty and Ukraine almost has a free pass to drive across, with just the river to deal with.

I could go on about Russia not foreseeing the rapid and solid coalescing of Western nations to impose a tough sanctions regime or the almost complete trashing of their military machine. There are plenty of other examples.

Did Putin, the master strategist, really expect these outcomes?

Was he too confident?

Did his people sweat the details of Risk Management?

Now here are a couple of interesting non-Ukraine examples:

Green energy distribution:

By enabling consumers to produce their own electricity and become “prosumers,” distributed renewable energy resources are expected to shift the cost of energy transmission to traditional consumers, creating a “death spiral.” In a new study, researchers discovered that the transmission charge, in fact, does not always rise as more prosumers enter the electricity market. However, strategic prosumers encourage death spirals, which can be mitigated by imposing tax regulations on their electricity consumption. — Tokyo University of Science on Medium.

In other words, green energy for those who can go off-grid increases energy costs for others who have to stay on-grid. I should point out that this was a mathematical modelling exercise.

Letting water take its natural course

200 years ago, the community of Swindale (in Cumbria, England) embarked on an ambitious project to straighten a section of the beck (river), with the aim of speeding the flow of water through the valley and increasing the amount of farmland surrounding it.

That had unintended consequences. The faster-flowing water was too swift for fish like salmon and trout to spawn. And the river carried more sediment downstream, making it murkier. — BBC

Fortunately (or not, depending on your point of view) this proved to be reversible. Recently the wiggles in the river were restored by a team of diggers as part of a project run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the water company which now owns the land.

“About three months after the diggers left — we had salmon and trout spawning in the river again,” said Lee Schofield from the RSPB in an interview with the BBC. There are some good before and after Google Earth pictures in the BBC story.

There are worse examples of man tinkering with Mother Nature and being surprised by her response, but here’s another one that caught my eye:

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s and Spread the Net’s provision of mosquito nets caused environmental and human destruction, as many of the people provided with these mosquito nets decided they were better used as fishing nets, leading to overfishing and similar unintended consequences. (Wikipedia)

I hadn’t intended this story to be so long, but maybe my planning was poor.

A lesson

And here’s a lesson for you, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. In the West we call it the Seven Ps:

Proper

Planning and

Preparation

Prevents

Piss

Poor

Performance

…and unintended consequences.

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