Laws of Leadership: Murphy's Law

Even well-laid plans can go awry in unexpected ways.

Murphy's Law: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

This critical concept dominates the "operational level" of work in any organization.

Every day, as the leader, you get a report of everything that went wrong yesterday. It's your job to build systemic countermeasures to make sure whatever went wrong yesterday cannot go wrong again.

Murphy's Law reminds us that our approach to process and adherence involves building a process, then experimentally discovering everything that can go wrong by trial and error and fixing it.

Murphy and Pareto (80% of your losses are in 20% of your problems) work together. If you just fix (and actually fix it with systemic methods) yesterday's biggest problem each day, you will rapidly solve all substantial problems in any system because your most costly issue is likely the one on yesterday's report.

Murphy's Law can be seen as a roadmap to excellence, we must study our failures such that we can achieve excellence.

And realize that successful processes aren't flawless from the start. They are battle-tested through iterations. Successful leaders see the opportunity in failures, study them diligently, and make iterative process changes to prevent recurrence.

Combined with Gall's Law, you have Iterative Learning (Murphy's) and Iterative Process Design (Gall's) method implied, which is a very effective approach.

Leading change is hard. Murphy's Law is real and we have to structure our leadership to compensate.

Change leadership is a marathon. You can't ignore potential pitfalls, or you simply won't succeed.