The manager's coup

Oversight is an important quality in any system. Your original system is designed to achieve some particular outcome or perform some action, but it's not enough to merely trust the design. Firstly, there may be flaws in the design that only show up later on, and secondly the needs of the system can change over time. It can't be the job of the system to evaluate and correct itself, because that would lead to an over-complicated system with a fairly substantial conflict of interest. Normally, you build a second system with oversight over the first one.

This pattern appears in software fairly frequently, where you will run some base service that is expected to work all the time, and then a second monitoring service to make sure. You don't want to build monitoring into the base service, because that would significantly increase its complexity. And, more importantly, if the service isn't working properly, chances are it won't be able to monitor itself properly either. This is the software equivalent of a conflict of interest. You always build a separate monitoring system.

In human systems, the same pattern appears in governance and management. You don't get employees to monitor their own performance, because then they would have to keep up with a lot of management-level knowledge and skills that would make their job a lot harder. Additionally, a worker who is performing badly might also be bad at evaluating their performance, or hide problems out of self-interest. So too in politics, where politicians are given oversight over the operation of society. One system to do things, another to oversee the first.

But, an important question: which system is more important? If you think the answer is management, or they're equally important, I'd encourage you to consider the utility of a monitoring system with nothing to monitor, a government with no society to govern, or a manager with no employees to manage. The oversight system is important, yes, perhaps even the biggest contributor to the success of the system it monitors, but without that underlying system it is completely useless, just dead weight.

However, that's not how things end up working in practice. We consider management to be the most important and powerful part of a company, and politicians the most powerful part of the citizenry. They're not just an important support structure for the system, they are in charge of the system. The original system, the one doing the work, can even start to seem like a minor implementation detail of the management system. After all, when you want to change direction it's the management system you talk to, and the management system that tells you whether the underlying system is working properly. It's so, so easy to think that the management system is the system itself.

I call this the manager's coup, and I think it's essentially historical in origin. The first managers were actually owners, and the first governor was a king. We began with a divine hierarchy starting at the big G and going all the way down to serfs and slaves. That system wasn't very efficient or well-organised, of course, but it flowed neatly from the power structure of the day. Only much later did we start to believe in individual freedom and optimising for efficient delivery of outcomes rather than upholding the universal pecking order.

Even though we no longer believe in that hierarchical social order, we still seem to look to it for inspiration. In some way, we still instinctively feel that oversight is ownership, and that management is power. These ideas perpetuate themselves by mimicry and resistance to change. But there is an essential tension between the manager's coup and the reality as represented by outcomes. Sure, you can believe that the managers are the most important part of your organisation, but you're going to lose to companies that don't. In the end, oversight doesn't pay the bills.

It's harder to imagine systems where the people doing the work are in charge, and management takes a supporting role, but there are examples out there. One good one is the relationship between a writer, actor or musician and their agent. Instead of the agent hiring an actor and telling them what to do, the actor hires an agent to ask them what to do. The agent still exercises oversight, still makes decisions, and good ones are still very well compensated, but they serve the system they're overseeing, not the other way around.