It may not be what you think

Here is a story from Raymond Smullyan's book "This Book Needs No Title":

Once upon a time there was a man. This man had a dog. This dog had fleas. The fleas infected the entire household. So the man had to get rid of them. At first he tried to get rid of them individually using a fly swatter. This proved highly inefficient. Then he tried a flea swatter. This was also inefficient. Then he suddenly recalled: "There is such a thing as science. Science is efficient. With the modern American equivalent, I should have no trouble at all!" So he purchased a can of toxic material guaranteed to "kill all fleas," and he sprayed the entire house. Sure enough, after three days all the fleas were dead. So he joyously exclaimed, "This flea spray is marvellous! This flea spray is efficient!" 

But the man was wrong. The flea spray was totally inefficient. What really happened was this: Although the spray was inefficient, it was highly odiferous. Hence he had to open all the windows and doors to ventilate. As a result, all the cold air came in, and the poor fleas caught cold and died.
 

Another story, this time from my own experience:

A manager is worried about the backlog of work that is piling up. An employee looks back over the previous three years, does some analysis which shows that there is a regular pattern of workload every year and that the current year matches that pattern. They show this to the manager. The manager still pushes staff to get more done even though it is a proven fact that the workload will drop without any additional effort. If the backlog reduces, does the manager think:

a. The backlog has dropped because I pushed everyone to work harder
b. The backlog dropped because it always drops at this time of year

A third story:

Many years ago when I was studying epidemiology, we were given a hypothetical study to analyse in which test subjects who were suffering from a particular illness were put on a diet where they had to eat 200gms of chocolate a day. When I did my analysis I raised the following point: whatever was to happen from such a study, the result would not necessarily be because they ingested the chocolate. The result could equally have been what they had stopped eating as a result of having to eat the chocolate. Without knowing what their eating habits were prior to the study you can't determine what if anything was eliminated from their diet that could have caused the improvement in their health.

These stories illustrate three points:

• Sometimes an improvement doesn't come from an action you deliberately took, but is due to an unnoticed side-effect.
• Sometimes an improvement would have happened even if you had done nothing.
• Sometimes it isn't what you have started doing but what you have stopped doing that has resulted in an improvement.

Managers often think that they have to DO something to improve a situation. But sometimes things will improve if they simply let the situation be or STOP doing something that is causing the problem.