Avert the Negative

‘If anything can go wrong, it will!’ – Murphy’s Law

Often, when things go wrong, we use the crutches of what is popularly known as Murphy’s Law to justify unanticipated failure. Thus, we shift the onus of responsibility from ourselves and condemn the fiasco to the vagaries of the unknown. Some call it fate, some call it bad luck and others employ other words. But Murphy’s Law is really something else...

This modern hypothesis is credited to Capt. Murphy, an engineer at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949. One day, on finding a wrongly wired transducer, he cursed the technician responsible by saying, ‘If there is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it.’ The project manager added it to his list of ‘laws’ and called it Murphy's Law thus giving name to an ancient pessimism.

However, the articulation of the negative was put to positive use by the Air Force. In fact, they went on to describe their good safety record as due to a firm belief in Murphy's Law and in the necessity to try and circumvent it. Aerospace manufacturers picked it up and used it widely in their ads during the next few months, and soon it became part of modern metaphor.

Murphy’s Law is not about cynical logic about our perceived vulnerability. The law’s effectiveness is in first envisioning the most remote of possibilities for ‘things going wrong’, and taking remedial measures. While it is good to do the right things; to be better we must be able to anticipate what can go wrong. Doing so is termed risk analysis in planning parlance.

Murphy’s law inspires us to BE BETTER at the affirmative…
By first predicting and then averting every plausible negative!

- Pravin K. Sabnis