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.

Often, a core skill of middle management is the ability to manipulate the financial reports to compensate for a set of numbers that aren’t giving the right answer. Everyone who has put together a business plan knows that if you can’t fudge the key assumptions to justify the decision your boss wants to make, you don’t know enough about the business.

The intellectual backing for the leveraged buyout movement was explicitly disciplinary, and the use of debt as both as technology of control and as a way of serving the interests of capital-owners is clear as the moral of the case studies. Companies would pay out huge dividends and take on self-consciously risky Antoine’s of debt in order to ‘create a sense of urgency’ among their management, or to communicate management’s confidence that their accounting policies weren’t as aggressive as they looked.

This is the paradigm shift that might be required — that organisations and systems can be like people, having purposes without a single goal. An artist doesn’t have a successful career by maximising their art; they do it by repeatedly producing work that they are proud of.

That’s what the world could look like if we got rid of the blind spots. Business ought to be like artists, not paperclip maximisers. The economic concept of optimisation, and the institutions of management and government which enforce its use, effectively act as a brutal information reducing filter. By taking away the pressure to maximise a single metric (and therefore to throw away information that doesn’t relate to it), organisations could apply their decision-making capabilities much more effectively. They could innovate more, design more sustainable solutions and build less adversarial, longer-term relationships with their people.