Everything we do, whether a business or a land use plan or a nonprofit program or an economic development incentive, isn’t going to stay in the silo where we put it. We want to picture the world around us as working like machines, input -> predictable output, because that gives us some sense of optimism that we can predict what our work will cause.
But that doesn’t happen.
Instead, human communities are like forests and oceans and prairies. They are systems of interconnected systems (growth and decomposition, weather and weathering, hunter and prey), and what happens to one system impacts the others. And when we mess up one of them, it has an impact on everything else.
The impact is often an unintended consequence of what we did.
We make new unintended consequences all the time. And we don’t just fail to anticipate the unintended consequences, we purposely don’t go looking for them.
By not critically examining how our systems impact each other, we permit wide and deep, and often unintended, repercussions -- repercussions on real people.
Who, again, are supposed to be the ones we’re doing this for.