An Illusion of Control

The Rice and Chessboard story.

The industrial era was obsessed with measurement and control. A mechanistic mindset, with people and planet as predictable, cause-and-effect management. Complicated. We have educated our children for over five generations based on this principle, and schooled them in getting things right, with little room for wonder and awe.

It has become part of the DNA of how we work. If we want to know if our two year old child is performing to specification, The EYFS Statutory Framework will tell us, and I noticed this morning that because so many parents have opted to home school during the pandemic, there is a move now to have them register, so the Department for Education has “direct line of sight” to how they are performing. The news this morning was full of myriad other examples. Keeping prisoners on early release more effectively tagged. Epidemiologists being interviewed as to why Covid case numbers are falling when they had been forecast to rise. One of the answ…