The most effective intervention is often the one that stops forcing and lets a situation resolve itself.
The Daodejing recommends governing a large state as one cooks a small fish, which is to say without constant turning. The difficulty is that the doctrine supplies no test: the ruler who does nothing because intervention would make things worse and the ruler who does nothing from indifference are indistinguishable at the time.
In practice
- A manager who stops reorganising a functioning team finds output rises, having attributed the previous dip to the team.
- A manager who applies the same restraint to a failing team is described afterwards as absent.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is informational: an official who intervenes constantly destroys the local knowledge that would have solved the problem. Another is psychological, since forcing an action recruits resistance that leaving it alone does not.
- In its favour
- The pattern it names is recognisable in medicine's watchful waiting, in rewilding, and in management research on autonomy, where restraint outperforms constant adjustment.
- Against it
- It gives no criterion for telling restraint from neglect, and the outcome is used afterwards to decide which one it was.
- Standing
- Dating and authorship of the Daodejing are disputed. The precept gives no criterion for distinguishing restraint from neglect, which is the standing objection to it.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Razors, rules and the tools of careful thought