Chesterton’s Hedge

There’s a reasonably well-known principle in software engineering circles called Chesterton’s Fence. The idea, borrowed from the writer G.K. Chesterton, is simple: don’t remove a fence until you understand why it was put there. It’s become a useful corrective to the “move fast and break things” mentality — a reminder that the people who came before you weren’t idiots, and that thing you’re about to rip out might be load-bearing.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly in the context of helping our clients to change how they do software delivery. And I’ve concluded that Chesterton’s Fence doesn’t go far enough.

Here’s the problem: a fence is inert. You remove it, it stays removed. But most of the barriers we encounter in organisations when we try to change how they work aren’t fences. They’re hedges.

Cut a hedge, and it grows back. The roots remain.

This matters because most change programmes — the ones I’ve been involved in, the ones I’ve watched from the sidelines, the ones I’ve read the case studies about — are essentially hedge-trimming exercises. New processes get mandated (“Agile!”). Teams get restructured (“Team Topologies!”). Technology gets implemented (“SDLC Tooling!”). Consultants get paid. And six months later, too often, everything looks suspiciously like it did before.

The visible changed. The roots didn’t.

What I mean by roots

When I talk about roots, I mean the attitudes and beliefs that generate visible behaviour. The stuff below the surface. An organisation that hoards information isn’t doing so because of inadequate collaboration tools — it’s doing so because somewhere along the line it learned that visibility is dangerous. An organisation with endless approval processes isn’t bureaucratic by accident — it learned that decisions can get you blamed.

These aren’t irrational responses. They’re protective ones. And they grew from something.

Usually pain. Failed change initiatives. Leadership upheaval. Public scrutiny. Broken promises. The organisation learned, and the learning went deep. The roots developed to protect the organisation.

Six principles

I’ve been trying to articulate this as a set of principles. Here’s where I’ve got to:

1. Hedges protect and provide boundaries. They exist for reasons, even when those reasons aren’t visible.

2. To understand the hedge, examine the roots. What is it protecting against? Does that threat still exist? Is the protection still working?

3. Trim the hedge, and it grows back — sometimes unpredictably. Surface change doesn’t last if the roots remain. And when hedges regrow, they don’t always regrow neatly.

4. New hedges planted in uncleared ground struggle. This is the transformation layering problem. Organisations continue to introduce new structures, frameworks, and ways of working, but the old root systems remain, competing for the same resources. No wonder nothing takes.

5. Some hedges are ornamental — until they’re not. Compliance frameworks are a good example. They sit there, shallow-rooted, largely decorative. Then the organisation faces actual trauma — a breach, a regulatory action, a public failure — and suddenly the roots go deep. The problem is they often end up in the wrong place, because they grew reactively rather than intentionally.

6. The soil determines what grows. Sector norms, ownership structures, regulatory environments, and founding stories — these are the conditions that shape where hedges form and how deep the roots go. A commercial organisation is biased toward growth; a public sector body is biased toward frugality. These aren’t choices so much as soil conditions.

So what?

The practical implication is this: if you’re trying to change something in an organisation and it keeps not changing, you’re trimming the hedge. The visible behaviour might shift temporarily, but the roots remain intact and will regenerate what was there before.

The alternative is what I propose to call Root Work. It’s slower. It requires understanding what the roots are protecting against and whether that threat remains real. It means acknowledging that the protection made sense — that the hedge grew for good reasons. It entails modifying soil conditions to enable different roots to grow.

I’m developing tools to help explore roots and then work with clients to change at a deeper level. If you are interested in finding out more, then drop me a line…