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.

Regulation by veto is a powerful way of solving huge and complicated search problems, because vetoing a situation as unacceptable is a very informationally ‘cheap’ action.

We’ve already seen how accounting systems can act as an information-reducing filter. It follows from this that the greater the emphasis placed on accounting-based targets set by the CEO, the greater the filtering effect.

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