The Ethics of Entanglement

Why the ‘Tool’ is Never Neutral

Find out why leadership is less about inspiration and more about taking responsibility for the worlds you build.

In the previous posts, we established that the Organisation is an apparatus, a mesh of material constraints that ‘cuts’ reality into specific shapes. This leads us to the Agential Realisms’ ethico-onto-epistemology.

It is a mouthful of a word, but its meaning is simple: You cannot separate what you know (epistemology), from what exists (ontology), from what is right (ethics).

In the old Newtonian world, we believed in the neutral and separate tool. We thought: "The Performance Review system is neutral; it just measures who is talented." Agential Realism screams NO. The tool is not neutral. The tool creates the subject. And because we design the tool, we are complicit in the behaviours it produces.

The ‘Bad Apple’ Fallacy

When a scandal hits an organisation (e.g. fraud, bullying, burnout) leaders often scramble to find the ‘Bad Apple’. They fire the offender and say, "We have removed the toxicity." But if you look at the apparatus, you often find that the ‘Bad Apple’ was exactly the fruit the tree was designed to grow.

Consider an organisation that uses Stack Ranking (forcing managers to rate 10% of staff as ‘failures’ every year).

• The apparatus: A distribution curve algorithm + A bonus pool tied to individual rank + A culture of ‘up or out’.

• The subject produced: This apparatus enacts a specific kind of human: The ‘Saboteur’.

• The behaviour: To survive, employees stop sharing ideas. They let peers fail. They hoard resources.

This is not a moral failure of the employee. The employee is being entrained by the governing constraints of the system. The apparatus demanded a winner-takes-all reality, and the human subjects morphed to fit that reality.

We Build Our Own Monsters

We do this every day with metrics. We install a dashboard to measure efficiency (e.g., Call Handling Time in a call centre).

• The cut: We cut reality to measure speed, ignoring empathy.

• The reality enacted: Agents start hanging up on difficult customers to keep their average time down.

• The ethical failure: We measure speed but create a reality where listening to a crying customer is a ‘performance failure’.

We, the designers of the dashboard, are ethically responsible for those hang-ups. We cannot blame the agents. We handed them a knife (the metric) and told them to cut.

The Materiality of Morality

This goes beyond incentives. It is in the matter.

• The office layout: If you build a glass-walled ‘Executive Floor’ separate from the workers, you are materially enacting a reality of Distrust and Hierarchy. You are physically preventing empathy. You cannot then complain about "lack of engagement."

• The software interface: If your procurement software has 50 required fields and no ‘Help’ button, you are enacting a reality of frustration and bureaucracy. You are stealing life-hours from human beings. That is an ethical violation, codified in code.

The Weight of Design

This shifts the burden of leadership from inspiration to responsibility. If the apparatus produces the subject, then every design choice is a moral choice. When you choose a KPI, you are choosing what matters in the world. When you design a meeting room, you are deciding whose voice can be heard. When you write a policy, you are deciding who is included and who is excluded.

Design then becomes political.