Consequences

Category: Editorial

Richard Winfield - editor and principal consultant I love to watch the law of unintended consequences in action and have not written about it recently. You know, because people do not think from a systems perspective they do things that end up eventually achieving the opposite of the original objective.

"The Commonwealth Games are scheduled to be held in March 2006 in Melbourne, Australia. Several Australian states have changed the daylight saving time transition end dates to the first Sunday of April 2006. These states include New South Wales, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory, South Australia, and Tasmania."

I was fascinated when I was in Melbourne recently to learn about the above response to the Commonwealth Games. I doubt that it will lead to any unintended consequences but it has probably led to some unexpected ones. For the next week parts of Australia will be out of step with the rest of the world.

You might not think an hour is important. But consider computers talking to each other. The automated daylight saving time programs on computers do not take account of this one-off measure. Some people will manually change their clocks; others won't. So, what time is it?

Some activities are time dependent. For example, a contractual communication - what time was it sent, maybe even what day? Midnight in Australia will take place at different times in different states.

It makes you think.

Time and time zones fascinate me. What is time? It is an artificial construct. Time and date are based on the movement of the sun. If there is a true time anywhere, it should be based on when the sun is overhead, but that would mean a continually changing clock as you travel east or west. So we have time zones. And when they don't work throughout the year, we have daylight saving time. In the UK we have complaints from Scotland because children going to school in the winter have to travel in the dark. The question I ask is "why don't they just change the times of the schools?". After all, different countries and different industries work at relatively different times anyway. Generally blue collar workers start much earlier than white collar workers.

A story

An engineer, a doctor and a lawyer were playing golf when they came up behind a group of men who were playing very erratically and thus very slowly. As they got more frustrated with the ongoing delay they asked who these people were; after all, this was a very select golf club allowing only proficient golfers as members. They discovered that they were firemen who, some years ago, had fought a major fire at the clubhouse and been blinded. The club had offered them life membership as a form of compensation.

The trio started to discuss what the club could have done for these firemen without disrupting the use of the course.

The doctor explained various medical and surgical processes that might have been able to save the men's eyesight. The lawyer suggested that they should have sued the insurance company for a mammoth compensation payment.

The engineer asked: "Why don't we just ask them to play at night?" – a win-win for all.

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