The 2nd order effects of your actions

What we colloquially refer to as an "immature" person is someone who doesn't think through things before saying or doing something. Not thinking through things refers to not thinking through the 2nd order effects of your own actions.

I've seen 23 year olds who are good at thinking through 2nd order effects. I've also seen 50 year olds talk without thinking through the 2nd order effects.

Being able to think through 2nd order effects is a muscle that I believe anyone can develop.

What are 2nd order effects?

They are the consequences of the consequences of your actions. At any point you are about to say something or do something, pause and ask yourself: "what are all the invisible or unintended consequences that may happen after I do or say this".

And once you map out every possible invisible or unintended consequence, use that to determine if your original course of action is correct or not. Several times in a week when I mentally do the 2nd order effects exercise, I come to realise that my original plan was not a good one.

For example when I'm about to tell someone off for doing something incorrectly, I might hold back. Because the 2nd order effect of telling someone off for doing something incorrectly is that in the future they may hesitate coming to me to get things reviewed. I decide the better course of action is to point out to them (in a non-frustrated manner) what they did wrong and how they could do it better.

If you find it hard to think through the 2nd order effects of your actions, try writing it down on a notepad.

More examples of the 2nd order effects of actions

Hurting People
Imagine over lunch break conversation, you make fun of a male celebrity that is short. And everyone at the table laughs at your joke. What you didn't realize though is that there is a colleague in the group who is also short and is insecure about their height. Youve cracked your joke at the expense of hurting him and hurting your relationship with him. The 1st order effect is that you made people laugh. The 2nd order effect is that everyone laughing at a joke about short men is going to hurt one person. Was the trade-off worth it?

Competing Work Priorities
Let's do a more relevant example when it comes to our workplace. Let's say you want your subordinate to create a client presentation that you don't have time to do yourself. So you message them and say "Can you get this presentation for client X done by today?". This subordinate goes on complete the presentation by the end of the day, so that's good. But the next morning you wake up to an email from Client Y asking why something wasn't done by yesterday. Which is when you realize that your subordinate didn't complete their usual work for the day because you dumped something else on their plate.

The takeaway here is that you didn't anticipate giving your subordinate the presentation work  ended up being at the expense of them not being able to complete their usual work. So the 2nd order effect of assigning them the presentation for Client X was that you ended up frustrating Client Y.

Yes your subordinate should have proactively informed you about how this would affect Client Y's work. However in terms of how you as a manager should have ideally handled this situation, you'd have first enquired with your subordinate what their work for the day looks like. And then work with them to see if they can somehow fit in the presentation for Client X along with also completing whatever needed to be done for Client Y. Maybe you'd realize both can't be done at the same time. In which case you'd look for alternatives. Such as asking Client Y for an extension. Or finding some other subordinate to shoulder some of the work.

The 2nd order effects are not always obvious

For an action, there may be several probable 2nd order effects, but it may not be clear which one is going to play out. In such cases, I start running probabilities. As in I'd think to myself something such as: "low chance that X will react badly to it, but high chance that she'll speak to Y and Z about what I told her". Whatever flow I believe is most probable, I'll go with that and hope that I'm right.

Dealing with someone bad mouthing their manager
Let's say a colleague informs me confidentially about how someone in the team has been bad mouthing their manager. Now my initial reaction would be for me to pull up the person and ask them why they are bad mouthing their manager without revealing to them who informed me about this. The 1st order effect would be that the bad mouthing will likely reduce, which is good. But the 2nd order effects aren't immediately clear. One of the possibilities is that the person might quickly trace back who it is that snitched on them and that would ruin their relationship. Another possibility is that maybe they'd find it too difficult to trace it back to one person because let's say this bad mouthing happened over a lunch table discussion with 10 other people. Where it could have been anyone who told me about the bad mouthing.

And now that I've thought through the various possible 2nd order effects, that helps give me some direction for what to do next. And the next steps would be for me to ask the person who confided in me whether they heard about this in a 1-1 conversation or in a group setting. And let's say it turns out that it was a group setting with 10 people. Which gives me some confidence that it's okay to pull up the bad mouther and asking them why they did that, cause I believe the probability of the bad mouther connecting it back to the person who informed me about it, is low.

Anticipating the informer getting outed for informing me
I'd also want to ask the person who informed me whether it's okay if I pull up the bad mouther and I'd explain to them what the plan is. I'd want to keep them informed because in the worst case that the bad-mouther asks the informer if they spoke to me, they'll know how to handle the conversation. And more importantly, I wouldn't want to blindside the informer - I'd want them to know that I did maintain confidentiality and only spoke to the bad-mouther after I got their permission to do so.

What if the bad mouthing was justified?
And to further point out how 2nd order (and 3rd order effects) are not obvious / invisible - I'd map out more things that I might end up inadvertently setting in motion.

For example, what if it's the manager that is actually bad? What if the bad mouther had justifiable reasons to bad mouth their manager? Which means that if I pull them up in a harsh way, I may risk coming across as someone who is blindly taking the side of the manager without first hearing out both sides.

So now that I've thought about these other 2nd and 3rd order effects, I might possibly decide that I'd want to tweak how I pull up the bad-mouther to ask them about what happened. As in, instead of asking them "why are you badmouthing your manager??", I'd ask them "hey, so how are things going with your manager?". That would make me look like someone who cares about the truth more than just worrying about act of bad mouthing itself.