Parenting, managing, and leading all fail the same way
Why repeating yourself is not a strategy but a symptom of the very problem you're trying to solve.
Last week I discovered for the 47th time that I have no idea how parenting works.
The feeding-and-bedtime part I had covered. Badly, but covered. The problem is a different one.
I’m talking about the deeper mechanism underneath every family that either makes things work or makes them collapse slowly in ways that only become clear in therapy, fifteen years later, at great expense, while the therapist nods in a way that costs you forty euros per nod.
My daughter was running around the kitchen island dragging her racoon by the tail. I did what I always do: explained, calmly at first, why that was wrong. Then explained again, less calmly. Then explained a third time with the specific tone that had the dog looking at me for 20 minutes with his best expression of “geez, why are you so insufferable?”.
Nothing changed. I stood in the kitchen wondering whether I was raising a child or genuinely just talking to a wall that eats all my snacks.
That little wall, for the record, was winning.
Norbert Wiener would have recognized the problem immediately.
Wiener was a mathematician at MIT, a child prodigy who finished his PhD at eighteen, which is either inspiring or devastating depending on how your own twenties went.
During World War II, he was requested to build an anti-aircraft system accurate enough to hit a moving plane. Sounds obvious today, but some 80 years ago the world and the technology available was completely different.
The system had to predict where the target was going, and to do that, it had to continuously read its own previous errors and adjust on the fly.
He couldn’t shoot at the position of the aircraft. It needed to shoot at where the aircraft would be when the shells got there. That required a whole lot of prediction skills, which meant shooting, missing, collecting the data from the miss, and correct.
Wiener saw something in that problem that went far beyond artillery, which is what matters to this article:
A system with no return signal cannot correct itself. It can only repeat the same action, with the same error, indefinitely.
Like a grown man in a kitchen explaining the danger of running on tiles around a wooden block with sharp edges and a dumb dog in the house, to someone who has already stopped listening and is thinking about chocolate milk.
He called the framework cybernetics, from the Greek for “steersman.” A helmsman does not set a heading and go take a nap. He keeps adjusting. The steering is an ongoing ping-pong game with the environment. Yelling at the water won’t do any good.
I had been making announcements to my daughter that I don’t like her running in the kitchen, which she clearly didn’t care about. It was one-way communication.
I’ve done the same in other instances, for example, when I impatiently asked her to be patient about something. We adults make no sense.
In this conversation with my daughter, I had built no mechanism to check whether my information was being understood, what it meant to her, or why she was ignoring my request.
Information was traveling in one direction only, and Wiener was very clear on what one-directional information produces: a system that cannot self-correct, because it has no basis for knowing it needs to.
His deeper claim, the one that made cybernetics genuinely revolutionary, is that control and communication are the same thing.
Read that again. That’s pure genius.
Control and communication are the same thing.
You cannot govern a system you are not in active conversation with. Think about a thermostat. The thermostat does not heat the house because someone told it to once. It heats the house because it reads the current temperature against the target, finds the gap, and acts on that gap, continuously. The gap is the information, and the information is what makes control possible.
A family runs on that same logic. So does a marriage, a creative project, a working relationship of any kind.
But I didn’t connect the dots until my daughter, after the fourth time I told her I didn’t like what she was doing, looked at me and said, “I hear you, Dad, but why?”
That was the feedback I didn’t ask for, and I’m thankful she got fed up with me and delivered it.
That was information, arriving from the system, telling me my entire model of the situation was wrong.
I was treating the whole behaviour as a compliance problem, but it was actually a comprehension problem. The gap here is a whole universe.
Interludium: There’s something brutally humbling in being taught such an important life lesson from a little critter you do your best to keep alive on a daily basis. It makes you proud of them, but it also hurts like hell when you realise you should have been doing better for her.
The bare minimum I do at home has to be at least as good as what I do at work, and this time it wasn’t even close.
Wiener would have called what I was doing open-loop control: inputs going in, no return signal, outcomes assumed rather than observed. What she handed me, besides my @ss, was the beginning of a closed loop, the kind that actually changes behavior, in systems and in four-year-olds.
At that moment, my daughter was a better systems thinker than I was. She still is, and she knows it.
The pattern we’re looking at is repetition without resolution. When the same unwanted output keeps appearing despite repeated inputs, the instinct is to adjust the input, say it differently, yell it, present it with a new attempt at a sexier slide deck.
But we’re looking at a deeper problem here. We’re looking at no outcome at all from the same repeated input.
If you or someone else is running a monologue, there’s a good chance you’re trying to fix a system but running an open loop. Marriage fights and arguments, I’m looking at you right now.
Wiener’s framework points somewhere else first: check whether a return channel exists at all. If information from the system is not completing the circuit back, more input will not fix anything. The loop is open, and open loops are not correctable by volume.
Build a return channel into any system you are trying to influence. With my daughter, it was about showing her that I was concerned about her running on a slippery floor and cracking her head open on the edge of the kitchen island.
I could have saved everyone a lot of Tuesday evenings if I had looked at parenting with the systems thinking eyes. But as the saying goes: the shoemaker’s son always go barefoot.
Not this shoemaker’s. Not anymore.
The key is to create the conditions under which the system can speak back, and then to treat what it says as data rather than a personal attack on your parenting.
Happy building (and parenting),
— R.