One of the classic coaching questions is "and what else?". It exposes the fact that challenges - and solutions - are complex and often exist out of sight adjacent to the challenge being talked about.
The same is true for almost everything in a system - everything and anything we do has an impact outside of that being immediately considered, from the flap of a butterfly's wing to education policy. We have understood this for a long time and yet we still insist on simplistic, linear apprasials of both actions and people. We do internal rate of return and cost benefit analyses on projects and are blind to what else happens - both good and bad - as an indirect result. The system never forgets, and brings things back into balance, increasingly in very inconvenient ways.
It's true at a personal level. Increasingly anything we utter or write is captured digitally, stored away and connected. Those white lies or economies of truth we commit pop up years into the future when the context has chang…
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