Managing from Ignorance

Andante

I always ask my family doctor a question she doesn’t expect: “What would the behavioral conditions need to be such that I wouldn’t require this medication?”

Sometimes the answer is straightforward: “Nothing. You have a condition that requires pharmaceutical intervention regardless.” Fair enough.

But often, the answer reveals that the medication is compensating for conditions that could be otherwise. The medication that wouldn’t be needed if I changed some of my life choices.

Most people never ask this question. They take the prescription and continue with the conditions that made it necessary. The medication becomes permanent solution to what might be temporary problem requiring different thinking.

The parallel to management is exact, and more troubling than it first appears. There’s the manager who thinks they can optimize individual performance through better incentives (the calculation model) and the one who redesigns the work environment so good performance becomes the natural outcome (the commitment model). The latter looks obviously wiser. Stop medicating symptoms and create conditions where health emerges on its own.

But here’s where it gets complicated: you can’t actually redesign “the environment” to make good performance the natural outcome. That framing still works at too high a level of abstraction.

You can redesign the environment to make good performance more conducive, to remove the obstacles that suppress capability, and leave space where trust might develop rather than systems that punish it.

That’s legitimate work. The design doesn’t cause commitment, but at least it doesn’t actively undermine the conditions where commitment becomes possible.

But it’s still just backdrop.

Sviluppo

If you’re managing actual human beings (not abstractions called “human resources”), then the work is craft.

The craft is this: armed with some working theory about what makes us human, you learn to read how that gets articulated in this specific person. Sarah Chen. Marcus Thompson. First name, last name.

What moves Sarah specifically? What experiences has she had? What ambitions? What dreams? Then you put before her things she can move herself toward.

And you do this again tomorrow. Because Sarah on Tuesday, after her kid was up all night sick, is not the same Sarah who showed up Monday ready to tackle that strategic problem. Not because Sarah is inconsistent. Because human beings are embodied, situated, and contextual. The thing that landed as challenge on Monday lands as one more weight on Tuesday. Same gesture, different Sarah, and if you can’t tell the difference you’re managing last week’s Sarah.

The craft requires tools. Frameworks about motivation, theories about human development, models of how people make meaning. These matter. They’re how you develop the working theory that lets you see anything at all. What they can’t do is replace your own experience as well as the looking. When “applying the feedback framework” substitutes for noticing how Marcus actually experiences recognition, the tool has stopped serving craft and started preventing it. You’re managing the abstraction instead of the person.

The tool was supposed to help you look. At some point it started looking for you.

This is the distinction that gets lost, and it isn’t a clean one. The same framework, the same model, can serve the looking or stand in for it, and from outside you often can’t tell which a manager is doing. Sometimes the manager can’t either. But not being able to tell is not the same as being off the hook for looking.

We’d never accept this superficiality in our actual domains. The software engineer who said “code is code, it’s all the same” would be laughed out of the room. The physician who said “patients are patients” while ignoring the specific presentation would be committing malpractice. Yet “people are people,” “everyone wants to be valued,” “employees need clear expectations and feedback” pass without comment, and managers operate daily at exactly this level of abstraction about the people they manage.

What does being valued mean to Marcus, specifically? Some gesture registers as recognition for him; another, meant just as warmly, lands as performative, or condescending. And the line between them moves: what reached him last month may not reach him today. None of this is visible from the height where “everyone wants to be valued” is true.

Ripresa

Which is where the comfortable version of all this falls apart, including, especially, the manager who fixed the culture, redesigned the environment, and believes the work is therefore finished. None of this denies that management is also coordination and the hard scheduling of scarce things. It only notices where all of that finally lands: on Sarah, as more or less of what she needed, recognized or not.

Start with what the manager is proudest of. The incentive system isn’t an alternative to environmental design; it’s part of the environment she designed. When you install an incentive structure, you’re not “managing performance through calculation” instead of shaping conditions. You’re shaping conditions. You’re creating an environmental fact that determines what’s rational and what’s safe to attempt.

A heavy-handed version makes second-guessing prudent, gaming the metrics adaptive, and it makes trust expensive. A thoughtful one stops standing in commitment’s way. Either way it’s backdrop. The redesign and the incentive were never the two alternatives; they’re the same move at different settings, and neither one is the person.

And then the harder face of the same thing. She cannot do what I’ve described, read this person, by name, today, and again tomorrow, for forty people. The craft does not scale. But that is not an objection to the craft. It is the claim. You don’t see each person less. Past a certain number you stop reading them at all, and let the category report in their place, and the category always answers, confidently, in their name.

Management at scale is systematically treating the abstraction as if it were the person, and calling that a regrettable necessity is precisely how it gets licensed. The span of control isn’t neutral. It’s a decision about how many people you have agreed in advance not to see.

No one decides it that way, of course. It arrives as a headcount, a reorg, or a reasonable number. But that is what it is. Said out loud it sounds like what it is, which is why it’s never said out loud.

So there’s no luxury-of-small-teams exemption to hide in. The manager of six who reads no one is failing the same way as the manager of sixty, just with less alibi. The redesign doesn’t release her from the looking. It was only ever the room she does the looking in.

Which returns us to the question I put to my family doctor. The incentive, like the medication, is doing work; the question is what it’s compensating for. What would the conditions need to be such that you wouldn’t reach for it? Sometimes the honest answer is that you would anyway; some things require the intervention regardless. But often the incentive is holding up conditions that could be otherwise, and the reaching-for-it has become permanent, and no one in the room is asking the question.

The medication and the redesigned environment were never the real alternatives. Both are conditions arranged around a person you have either troubled to read or not. The drug compensates for a body; the incentive compensates for an environment; and standing inside both, on Tuesday, after a night with no sleep, is Sarah, who you are about to manage as though she were Monday’s.

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