Side Effects, Unintended Consequences or Happy Accidents?

Some Language

"Side Effect" is very much a loaded term. If I'm going to implement something as a technology leader and I talk about side effects, this inevitably starts people thinking about the (almost always deleterious) side effects of medication. It is fair to say that if a medication intended to fix a symptom, or a disease, also happened to make you less likely to have a heart attack, it would not be deemed a "side effect".

What about "unintended consequences"? Again this has negative connotations. Mostly, at least in my head space, "unintended consequences" tends to be used in conjunction with some kind of government policy. For example, we in the UK constantly hear about the unintended consequences of some change to tax policy. If the government moves to close some tax loophole, the idea is to raise more tax. In practice there are often unintended consequences, such as people relocating to a different tax jurisdiction in order to avoid the tax rise, which means that the Exchequer doesn't benefit at all from the change.

What about "happy accidents"? I'm not sure how ubiquitous The Joy of Painting, presented by Bob Ross ever was. It must have been pretty popular since, according to IMDB, it ran for 31 seasons from 1983 - 1994. In each episode the artist painted a picture, went through it step by step (making it look really easy), before signing the masterpiece at the end. I am no artist, so I can't speak for how easy or difficult it ever was the reproduce what Bob Ross did, but I loved the program. 

One of the things The Joy of Painting was famous for was Bob Ross's "happy little accidents", where he would do something non-deliberately but would always somehow work it into the painting so that it looked like it was always meant to be there. There is nothing negative to say about the Joy of Painting, or the late, great, Bob Ross, but I think I'd struggle to use a phrase involving the word "accident" in an industry where we have to show that our deliberate actions led to measurable value.

My computer setup happened by accident when it turned out my client computer (left) wouldn't let me install my preferred browser. I got another laptop stand and put my own machine next to it. The result, a "happy accident" gave me more valuable screen real estate and extra search functionality.

Secondary Benefit

So I spoke to a few people at work and asked how I should describe something that wasn't the directly intended consequence of an action but turned out to be useful. We got into a discussion about Secondary and Tertiary benefits. I wondered why we were talking "tertiary" instead of just "secondary"? It seems my colleague was arguing that secondary was something that might be called out and be subject to governance and tertiary could be something that is either not measurable or simply not measured. The governance point made a bit of sense in our client's context but felt a bit specific to our consultancy context. So in my head it feels like Secondary Benefit is a good phrase to use to describe something that was a good (possibly planned, or at least anticipated) thing that also happened as a result of the work.

Conclusion

Language and labels matter. This can influence how people think about things and those perceptions matter. When delivering things, we should attempt to convey the notion that all consequences of our actions were (hopefully) intended, but at least anticipated.

I will be using the phrase "Secondary Benefit" to describe things that were good consequences of a deliberate thing from which we derived a "Primary Benefit".