by Zain Jaffer
Just before Donald Trump was inaugurated as US President in January 2025, the popular social media app Tiktok pulled itself out of the US market, citing a ban enacted in the outgoing days of the Biden administration. While Trump decided to suspend the ban, mainstream media like CNN reported that thousands of loyal American Tiktok users decided to shift to a Chinese app called RedNote (XiaoHongShu) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiDSyWO1WN4], possibly as a way of rebelling against the ban.
This is an example of an unintended consequence. There are plenty of examples in life where if you ban something, the outcome is not really what you expect.
For example, the January 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles were exacerbated by well meaning policies that would protect wildlife flora and fauna. Unfortunately, the effect was to produce more dry fuel that were devoid of moisture due to lack of rain fanned by seasonal winds. Repairs on a hilltop reservoir were done for maintenance but led to a lack of water pressure for fire hydrants.
As leaders of businesses it is important to understand unintended consequences and how these could affect your business and employees.
Sometimes we identify problems in our companies, our families, our towns and cities, and our organizations. What is our immediate response? Often it is to try to fix the issue and forget it.
What we forget is that understanding why these problems happen is often just as important as fixing these problems. Not understanding the root causes just makes the problem happen again, or happen in a different way.
Most people try to prepare for risks that they know are probable because these happen often. If a problem occurs frequently, we develop over time an understanding and a working fix.
The problem is when the issue hardly happens, but is a symptom of something that could suddenly explode into a major problem. It is admittedly hard however, since you do not know what you do not know.
This is why aside from our operational and maintenance plans that work well for things we do on a day to day basis, we should also set aside time to analyze the impact of events and situations that happen around us. Ideally before we are forced to act because the losses and impact have become too huge not to.
Scanning our environment. Understanding issues as to why these happen and what the causes are. Using logic and empirical data to come to certain conclusions. These are things worth doing before our environment changes, just like a ship sailor on the lookout for icebergs dead ahead.
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