Graceful degradation was something that I had originally heard of in a computing context, but that I find has real application in the legal field (which is my field of work). When giving legal advice, whenever possible, you want to give guidance that will work even if only part of it is followed. (Because even as an in-house lawyer, I can pretty much count on my clients ignoring or reinterpreting my advice pretty regularly.)
This is especially important when some action or behavior becomes critical, but only in certain circumstances. For instance, advising my engineering clients NOT to do their own research into our competitors' proprietary technology is very important advice (because if they do, it leads to higher damages if they are found to infringe patents on said technology, and can also put the company at risk for misappropriating another company's trade secrets). On the other hand, if they are to learn something proprietary about a competitor, it is critical that they let the legal team know about it, since the consequences of mishandling that information are so high.
So to attempt to give gracefully degrading instructions in this space becomes a little self-contradictory if half the instructions are forgotten. "Don't try to reverse engineer competitor's code. But if you do, make sure to tell me about it." This usually results in clients remembering either: "Don't tell the lawyers if you learn competitor information" (resulting in not warning us they have competitor info) or "Be sure to tell the lawyers about any reverse engineering you do" (resulting in teams going out to try to specifically research competitor information).
This type of "Don't ..., But if you do ..." situation resists degrading gracefully, but comes up more than I'd like.
On an unrelated note, when I first learned this term, I just had an image of a very refined woman at a fancy dinner party, taking a sip of her wine and then turning to her husband and saying, "Darling, I love you, but this is simply the worst affair you've ever dragged me out to."
I found your example problem very interesting, and started thinking about social dynamics that match "tell me if you do it, but don't do it".
The closest cultural anchor I could find is that of sin, confession, priest. Modelling the situation as a confession might be an apt anchor
The "sin, confession, priest" metaphor is a great anchor - that's very similar to the feeling we try to project when we have these discussions with clients. And, related to Raemon's question, that's part of how I try to address the issue.
Specifically, we cast the instruction as much more of a simple commandment, leaving off the "But if you do" clause entirely from the particular guidance. So in this case, the instruction is: "Don't reverse engineer competitor technology. Including, don't buy copies of competitor tech or go searching for inside information. This information is risky for us to have (for various legal reasons I can bore you with, but aren't important right now), and so you DON'T WANT IT."
This guidance, along with any other 'commandments' goes into the general body of "Legal says 'Don't'" instructions. Which is more or less what most folks expect from a legal department. (We work hard not to be, but a lot of legal teams are considered the "Department of 'No' ".)
And then, we overlay the number one rule over the top of all other guidance, and we finish with this every time: if you think you did something you shouldn't have, tell us right away. If we don't know, we can't help you.
So to the original metaphor, we try to make ourselves part of the path to absolution (or at least mitigation), so that the rules can be simpler.
On the whole, it's a little bit of the reverse of the original "Don't ... But ..." construction. We try to flip it to: "We can help you if you screw up, but only if you tell us. Here's what we hope we don't have to help you with." This way, if they remember a "Don't", it's all good. If they forget a "Don't", but they remember "in case of doubt, ask legal", we're mostly OK. (If you sin, confess and get forgiven. If you don't sin, good for you.)
In more semantic terms, we try to avoid the "But if you do ..." construction, since that seems to stick with people in a way that ignores the "Don't" part of it. By making the top rule, "let me help you if you break a rule", it's easier to keep from making the activity that breaks the rule sound like a premise for positive action.
I wouldn't say we do great with this, but it's part of an overall effort to cast legal as useful advisors (also a priestly role), rather than enforcers.
This idea (without the name) is very relevant in First Aid training.
For example, if you learn CPR from some organisations they will teach you compressions-only CPR, while others will also teach you to do the breaths. I have heard it claimed by first aid teachers that the reason for this is because doing the best possible CPR requires the breaths, but that someone who learned CPR one afternoon over a year ago and hasn't practiced since is unlikely to do effective breaths, and that person would be better of keeping to compressions only.
In First Aid books a common attempt to solve this problem is to give sweeping commands at the beginning (often with the word "never" somewhat abused), and then give specific exceptions later. The aim is that if you will remember one thing it will hopefully be the blanket rule, not the specific exception. I think that method probably has something to recommend for it, its hard to imagine how you could remember the exception without remembering the rule it is an exception too.
[For example the Life Support book, tells you 'never' to give anyone medicine or drugs, as you are a First Aider, not a Doctor. It also tells you to give aspirin to someone having a heart attack if they have not taken any other drugs. I think it also recommends antihistamines for swelling insect stings.]
1Semi-interestingly, my MMA school taught that it's best for the punch to arrive before the leading foot lands so that the punch carries your full weight. Many people at advanced levels weren't aware of this because we did not introduce it right away - if you try to do this before learning a few other details (and building strength), you run a risk of hurting your wrist by punching too hard.
2Yep, and to spell out the general case: there are techniques you shouldn't use unless you're confident you can use them correctly, because they do not degrade gracefully. Often these techniques aren't taught unless the instructor is reasonably sure the student has the other pieces to use it well.
As a note of pedagogy I usually prefer when the teachers says something like "This is the basic way to do it, and we're going to practice this first. If you're unsure, do it this way. We might get into variations later."
There’s a concept I think about when teaching, which I call Graceful Degradation. The basic idea is, how well does this lesson work if someone doesn’t remember it very well or if I teach it badly?
I.
Consider throwing a punch.
Make a fist with your thumb on the outside of your fingers, because you don’t want to pop your thumb. Place your feet shoulder width apart and then take a comfortable step forward with one foot and plant yourself solidly. Bring your fist close to your chest or face, then move it in a straight line from there to your opponent so you waste as little motion as possible. You want to make contact with the first knuckles of your pointer and middle fingers. Don’t hit someone in the face unless you’re wearing boxing gloves, particularly the jaw or mouth since that’s one big crumple zone.
Different martial arts might quibble over some of those details and a good instructor would drill you into much more precise form, but that’s a pretty good crash course on punching people. As a lesson though, it also has the interesting property that every single line is helpful in isolation even if you forget why the line is there.
If you forgot literally everything else except putting your thumb on the outside of your fist, well, at least you’re not going to dislocate your own thumb when you hit someone. If you threw an off-balance hook right to someone’s jaw but remembered to connect with your first two knuckles, that’s still better than landing with the inside of your fist. If you only half remember what your sensei said from years ago, well, you aren’t going to be worse off for using what you do remember. This lesson degrades gracefully.
II.
Compare this to heart transplant.
In a heart transplant,
If the surgeon forgets a step, the patient is going to have a very bad no good day. Some of it is kind of intuitive, in that it’s hard to forget you need to open up the chest to get at the heart before cutting the original heart out, but some of it isn’t. If you were performing heart surgery and you forgot what to do in order to get the heart beating again, that’s probably worse than not doing the heart surgery in the first place. Remember, introducing checklists to hospitals improved medical outcomes.
(Also, every one of those seven steps has substeps. Figuring out the right drug dosage to put a patient under without killing them is not obvious; imagine being handed the contents of the hospital pharmaceutical storage, presented with a patient’s chart, and asked to pick some vials.)
Heart surgery does not have the property of graceful degradation.
(Heart surgery is hard and high status, but there’s other things that don’t degrade gracefully. If you remember most of the rules of chess but not how knights move, then you aren’t going to be very successful at playing chess. If you remember half of the steps involved in killing and cooking a chicken, the result is not going to be appetizing.)
III.
I think this is useful to have in mind, especially when communicating.
If you’re trying to convey an idea, and it does not have the property of graceful degradation, then you need to put a lot more effort in if you want the idea to be properly used. If you have a project you want to work on, but the project only works if everyone involved actually has the whole concept down in their heads, then you’re going to need to check that they have all the parts. Conversely, if it’s enough for people to do a little better than they were doing at some of the parts, then you have a lot more options.
To put it another way, if you’re trying to get everyone to make good decisions every time, that’s really hard. If you’re just trying to get people to make better decisions, to be a little better tomorrow than they were yesterday. . . if you want to raise the sanity waterline, and there’s many ways people can be insane that are kind of independent of each other...
This, I claim, is doable. It’s just the ordinary kind of hard, not shut up and do the impossible kind of hard.
This shapes how I approach teaching. Since I don’t get years of detailed or personalized tutelage with people, I can’t assume I can teach them the kind of step by step sequences that a surgeon would use. I can’t even assume they’ll read the whole essay instead of skimming parts of it. As a result of that assumption, I discard lots of ideas for sharing that I think can’t be refined into a form with the property of graceful degradation.
It’s also worth considering what you think goes wrong if people miss parts of the advice. If you need to convey something where it needs all the pieces to go right, build in some warnings of what you expect to happen if someone goes off half cocked. I expect it also helps to explicitly embed the steps as part of a greater whole; this is the motivation behind making guides and instructions in the form of numbered lists. Even still, it seems common for people to remember steps one and two and four but not three.
Not everything has to have this property. Not everything can have this property. If you can express an idea such that it has this property, I claim that’s better.