A recurring theme from my last few posts is about how trying to do something can have the opposite effect. There are related terms which are more eloquent like hubris or nemesis, but I like the term backfire as a descriptor of this scenario for its simplicity and evocativeness. A milder case would be a misfire, where the actions you take don’t get you closer to your goal but don’t take you farther away either. Now that we can generalize this principle, it becomes easier to notice it happening elsewhere.
The whole point of being aware of backfires or misfires, besides helping you develop an appreciation for the tragic nature of the human condition, is to be able to avoid suffering them yourself. Not only should you figure out what you are really trying to do, but you should make sure that what you are doing will actually accomplish this.
So what should you look out for? First of all, these cases seemingly become more common as the path to your goal becomes more complex. Let’s assume you earn the median U.S. salary. If you want a thousand dollars, there are a number of simple actions you can take like adjusting your budget, working more, or changing jobs. Wanting a million dollars is still doable in a reasonable time frame on some salaries; you may have to make more radical career moves or budget changes, but the actions and their consequences are still legible. Wanting a billion dollars is a different beast. The path takes a whole lot of skill and/or luck, the focus required is difficult for many to maintain, and getting there often demands sacrificing friends, family, and other relationships, exactly the kind of trade that produces worse outcomes than if you had picked a more easily-attainable goal.
Second, backfire risk increases dramatically as your plans involve more independent actors and/or other forces which have distinct interests combined with power comparable to or greater than your own. It is easy to make plans and execute them in a (relative) vacuum or when you can be assured that all others will cooperate with you. It is much harder when others are working against your goals and are smart and/or powerful enough to stop actions that otherwise would have worked. It is even difficult when others aren’t necessarily hostile but have hidden intentions that are not fully opposed but not fully aligned to yours1.
Under the above circumstances, three specific moves help mitigate the risk. First, shrink the gap between the goal and the action: the more intermediate steps you need, the more places the chain can break and the more friction accumulates, so a two-step plan is more robust than a twenty-step one. Second, red-team the plan against everyone whose goals don’t fully align with yours: whoever stands to lose from your success will react to it, and whoever has overlapping but non-identical interests will pull the plan sideways, so walk through what they will actually do rather than what you wish they would. Third, pre-mortem the plan: picture the most plausible bad outcome and trace it back to whichever step of the current plan produced it; if your plan could produce a backfire, you can usually see the seed before execution.
For instance, collecting honey from a beehive is likely to cause more pain from bee stings than gain from the honey (backfire). Maybe you just run away once you realize the folly of this course of action (misfire). But if you shrink the gap by choosing hives that are easier to take honey from, red-team against the bees by understanding which species are least aggressive, and pre-mortem by putting on a bee suit, then suddenly obtaining honey becomes a whole lot less painful.
Planning and preparation can solve more than you might think. Humans were able to walk on the surface of the Moon with nothing more than meticulous calculations, engineering, construction, and training (all enabled by billions of dollars of government money). But the other emblematic technical achievement of the 20th century is the Manhattan Project, which executed brilliantly on its narrow goal of building a working atomic bomb and in doing so kicked off the arms race that has hung over the world ever since. Even with unlimited time and resources at your disposal, spending it to accomplish something that isn’t what you truly want is a misfire at best and a backfire at worst.
Footnotes
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Game of Thrones is full of these characters; Littlefinger and Tywin are the canonical examples. ↩