There was a nice little side-discussion about Chesterton's Fence on here recently - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31340408 https://news.ycombinator.com/i

There was a nice little side-discussion about Chesterton's Fence on here recently - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31340408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31340408 (that's the parent comment that adds a little context). In my work as a business advisor, this is a concept I use A LOT! Even long term team members or owners may be unaware of why things are the way they are, and it's especially prevalent in new management hires who feel obliged to make changes and prove their worth quickly. As a simple example, I had a client once who was subconsciously obsessed with cash flow. (To add more clichés, he saw it as 'once bitten, twice shy' and I saw it as 'Generals are always fighting the last war'.) His team would often propose ideas that would improve profit margins, and not understand why they were shot down or poorly implemented. By helping the founder, and then his team, understand how every strategic decision was driven by its impact on cash flow, all of that frustrated energy shifted. And then I got him a better accountant, who was briefed around what the motivating factor was. Once you understand the context behind a decision, even if your instinct to remove the fence was correct you can still do so more effectively.