An organisation does things, and it systematically does some things rather than others. But that’s as far as it goes. Systems don’t make mistakes — if they do something, that’s their purpose. But it also works the other way around. Systems don’t have inner desires, so they don’t do things intentionally either. There’s just a network of cause and effect. We might think they’re conspiring, but they’re working within structures that made the outcome inevitable. Or we might see everything as a terrible cock-up, but we don’t understand that the outcome was the inevitable result of the way the system works.

If a manager or management team doesn’t have information-handling capacity at least as great as the complexity of the thing they’re in charge of, control is not possible and eventually, the system will become unregulated.

It’s a concept that’s recognisable to anyone who has hung around consultants or business school academics as ‘management by exception’. That’s the commonsensical principle that as much as possible, people ought to be given tasks to do and left to achieve them. An ‘exception’, in the jargon, is an ‘exception to the rule’ — something the business unit comes across that it can’t deal with and so ‘escalates’ to the level above. In a company or organisation run on these principles, the job of management consists mainly in dealing with these sorts of unusual cases, and then occasionally revising the objectives handed down to the level below.

If you believe Stafford Beer, there’s a pretty strong result here in terms of battles between competing management philosophies. Management by exception is not just common sense; it’s the right thing to do, objectively.

There are two obvious ways to fail here. The translation and error-correction mechanism might be inadequate, or the managers might intentionally distort the signals in order to follow priorities of their own. The tragedy of senior management is that it can drift into either of these failure modes without realising; if either problem arises, it arises in their information and communication environment, so they won’t notice it. It’s the problem identified by Niccolò Machiavelli — a prince who is not wise cannot be well advised, and a manager who doesn’t have access to excess analytical capacity won’t be able to tell when something has gone wrong with their subordinates. But maintaining that spare management capacity is expensive.

If you consistently demand the impossible, you will inevitably get the unethical.