When Things Go Wrong – blame Murphy’s Law

“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

 

Don’t you just hate it when things happen when least expected. When you don’t see things coming your way and you're caught off-guard, and frustration kicks in because you have to start all over again. Understand that no matter how perfectly planned things are, sooner or later, something will go wrong.

 

I couldn’t really find an accurate validation as to whoever Murphy’s Law is attributed to. I tried researching it on the Net, and it had various associations to different individuals. But the common ground is that these folks had their own experiences of things going badly.

 

In my job in Human Resources, I keep reminding myself of Murphy’s Law. Especially when things seem so calm, I am never complacent that nothing wrong will happen. Because I condition my mind that everyday, something wrong is going to happen. And I am not being a pessimist; its not like I view things negatively, but more of me doing mental exercises of the probabilities of the different types of errors and what contingencies or preventive measures I should employ.

 

Being an HR practitioner we would like to keep a good record under our belts on having no or low counts of labor cases. But just recently I received a call from my previous employer asking about a particular case I handled, where the employee was terminated and we had it well documented and he was proven liable for it. But three years later, the employee filed a case. So what went wrong? I never even expected that this person would still pursue this after 3 years.

 

When dealing with employees, you really have to take into account their behaviour and current disposition. Which can be highly subjective, but nevertheless you have to put those into the equation if you are to anticipate what intentions these employees have down the line.

 

I’d also like to believe that in handling a particular situation, there are several ways of doing it to achieve the same results, the variance would be the number of errors that I will encounter, and that I must foresee and manage my expectations that no matter how small the chances of this error happening to mess things up, I should still be prepared for it. It doesn’t even matter if it’s caused by something that is not of this world, it can still contribute to things that may eventually go wrong.

 

So is this something inevitable? That there is no way of not committing an error? 

 

Take for example a commercial airline where we the consumers would expect that it is 100% safe. But in reality, their Six Sigma confidence level is at 99.99967%, which means there is still a 0.0000163% probability that something bad can happen. (Let’s hope not) But even they expect with a fraction of a chance that something can still go wrong. In other words, when somebody asks us, are we 100% sure, we say 99.99967% sure. 

 

We just have to accept the fact that we don’t live in a perfect world. That anything and everything may go wrong. It’s probably just a matter of time as to when will it go wrong. It may be a daily test for us, on how we react and deal with the situations. 

 

For me, Perfection is an illusion;

and in Michael J. Fox’s words…”Perfection is God’s business.” 

 

So when things go wrong, don’t blame God…blame Murphy’s Law.