The Mouse, the Manager, and the Great Illusion of Control

 

Let me begin with a confession.

For years I believed the scientist was training the mouse.

Then one day I realised nobody had ever asked the mouse for his version of events.

Imagine a laboratory mouse returning home after another exhausting day at work.

His wife asks:

"How was your day?"

The mouse sighs.

"Productive. The human is finally learning. Every time I press the lever, he brings me food."

At that moment, half of psychology collapses.

Because the scientist thinks he is conditioning the mouse.

The mouse thinks he is conditioning the scientist.

And quite annoyingly, they may both be right.

This sounds like a joke until you look around and realise that modern civilisation is basically one giant operant conditioning experiment where everybody thinks they're holding the remote control while secretly being programmed by everyone else.

The laboratory never disappeared.

We simply renamed it "society."

The Great Human Delusion

Human beings love processes.

We love systems.

We love procedures.

We love flow charts.

In modern organisations, if something cannot be converted into a PowerPoint slide with coloured arrows, people begin to suspect it isn't real.

What we rarely notice is that every system designed to influence behaviour eventually starts influencing its designers.

The manager creates a KPI to control employees.

Employees learn how the KPI works.

The KPI then starts controlling the manager.

The manager responds by creating more KPIs.

Soon everybody is serving the KPI.

The KPI has become the supreme being.

Nobody remembers why it was invented.

Marriage: A Cybernetic Battlefield

Take a husband and wife.

The husband forgets an anniversary.

The emotional consequences are immediate and educational.

By the following year he has learned.

Flowers appear.

Dinner reservations appear.

Apologies appear.

Everything appears.

The wife proudly tells her friends:

"I've trained him well."

Fair enough.

But after twenty years something interesting happens.

Now the husband automatically remembers anniversaries.

Flowers arrive with Swiss precision.

The wife begins expecting them.

If flowers fail to arrive, disappointment appears.

Without realising it, the husband's behaviour has conditioned her expectations.

She conditioned him.

He conditioned her.

Nobody is driving.

The marriage is operating on autopilot.

It's less a relationship and more a sophisticated feedback system running on flowers and passive-aggressive silence.

Friendship and the Free Therapist Problem

Friendships are no different.

One friend constantly calls to complain about life.

The other friend patiently listens.

Initially it seems noble.

One is helping.

The other is being helped.

Then six months later, one person has become emotionally dependent while the other has developed a Messiah complex.

The caller thinks:

"Whenever I am stressed, I'll call him."

The listener thinks:

"Only I can help him."

Both have accidentally trained each other.

The friendship becomes a subscription service nobody remembers signing up for.

Welcome to the KPI Zoo

Nowhere is this more obvious than the workplace.

Suppose management introduces a KPI:

Respond to every customer email within four hours.

Managers celebrate.

Efficiency!

Accountability!

Customer satisfaction!

Employees read the KPI carefully and smile.

Within minutes every customer receives this response:

"Thank you for contacting us. Your issue is important to us."

Problem solved?

No.

Problem acknowledged?

Barely.

KPI achieved?

Magnificently.

The customer is still furious.

The employee gets a good appraisal.

The manager receives a green dashboard.

The director presents a beautiful report to the board.

Everybody congratulates everybody.

The only unhappy person is the customer, who unfortunately is not measured by the KPI.

The employee believes he is giving management what they want.

Management believes it is improving customer service.

The statistics look fantastic.

Reality is quietly weeping in a corner.

When Dashboards Become the Reality

There comes a dangerous moment in every organisation.

A dashboard shows green.

Reality shows red.

Management chooses the dashboard.

This is because dashboards never argue back.

Reality can be terribly rude.

Employees quickly learn:

"Don't solve the problem. Solve the measurement."

Managers learn:

"Don't examine the reality. Examine the metric."

The result is a strange organisational religion where numbers become sacred while actual outcomes become optional.

It is entirely possible to have a perfectly healthy dashboard and a dying company.

Many have.

The Yes Man Appreciation Society

The same phenomenon becomes far more dangerous in politics.

Many leaders claim they want honest feedback.

What they actually want is honest feedback that sounds suspiciously like praise.

Subordinates learn quickly.

Bad news shortens careers.

Good news extends careers.

So everybody supplies good news.

The leader thinks:

"My policies are working brilliantly."

The officials think:

"Our leader is pleased."

Reality thinks:

"This should be entertaining."

History is littered with examples.

Nokia's decline has often been associated with internal cultures where uncomfortable truths about competitors were not always communicated effectively upward.

Political regimes throughout history have suffered similar problems when leaders became surrounded by people whose primary talent was agreement.

The problem is not merely dishonesty.

Often nobody is consciously lying.

Everyone is simply adapting to incentives.

The system manufactures deception automatically.

Like an industrial assembly line.

Tom and Jerry: The Greatest Philosophers of Agency

Oddly enough, perhaps the finest explanation comes from Tom and Jerry.

Tom believes he is chasing Jerry.

Jerry believes he is manipulating Tom.

Every episode follows the same pattern.

Tom develops a clever plan.

Jerry outsmarts him.

Tom adapts.

Jerry adapts.

Tom adapts to Jerry's adaptation.

Jerry adapts to Tom adapting to Jerry's adaptation.

By the end, nobody remembers who started what.

The chase becomes self-sustaining.

It exists because it exists.

If Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had been cartoon writers, they might have created Tom and Jerry.

The International Version

The same loop exists between nations.

The United States pressures Iran.

Iran adapts.

The adaptation prompts a new American response.

The new response generates another Iranian adaptation.

Neither side simply acts.

Each side reacts to reactions which were themselves reactions to previous reactions.

At some point, the relationship becomes a machine that runs itself.

Likewise, India and China continually observe, respond, adapt, and counter-adapt along strategic, economic, and military dimensions.

One development influences the other.

The response influences the original actor.

Control becomes circular rather than linear.

The old notion that one side is purely the actor and the other merely the recipient begins to collapse.

Meta, Google and the Ultimate Lever

And now we arrive at the truly frightening part.

Meta and Google.

Originally technology companies built algorithms to shape user behaviour.

Reasonable enough.

Then users learned the algorithms.

Content creators learned the algorithms.

Advertisers learned the algorithms.

Influencers learned the algorithms.

Everyone began optimising themselves for the machine.

The machine then had to change because people had adapted.

People adapted again.

The machine changed again.

Eventually the algorithm started shaping society while society simultaneously reshaped the algorithm.

Now ask a terrifying question:

Who is actually in control?

Meta?

Google?

The users?

The advertisers?

The influencers?

The algorithms?

The answer appears to be:

"Yes."

And that is precisely the problem.

The Scary Loop

This is why the laboratory mouse is such an important philosopher.

He reveals something unsettling.

Most modern systems are built upon the assumption that one side controls the other.

Manager controls employee.

Parent controls child.

Government controls citizen.

Platform controls user.

Scientist controls mouse.

Yet in reality, both sides are constantly adapting to each other.

The controller becomes controlled.

The controlled becomes controller.

Both gradually become prisoners of a recursive loop.

That is why so many organisations become obsessed with procedures rather than outcomes.

Why governments become trapped in propaganda.

Why friendships become unhealthy.

Why social media becomes addictive.

Why Tom never catches Jerry.

Everyone is responding to everyone else.

Nobody is steering.

The entire system simply keeps going because each participant is busy reacting to the reactions of the other participants.

The mouse presses the lever.

The scientist delivers food.

The mouse presses again.

The scientist delivers again.

Years later both publish memoirs claiming they were the one in charge.

And perhaps that is the ultimate joke of modern life.

We are all mice.

We are all scientists.

And somewhere in the corner, reality is watching this comedy unfold and wondering whether anyone has noticed that the lever is now pressing itself.

Cheers.

Note: 

I must give credit to my dearest friend Raj Kumar who lives in Washington DC, for prompting this dilemma.

ravivarmmankkanniappan@200715082026 3.04384° N, 101.58062° E

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