No one reads the framed sentences of the rules on the wall. And even those who read them are not moved by them. The first thing I noticed, once I took the seat that binds the whole of governance together, was that bare fact. So what does move people? I reached behind the organization and began to trace the wiring. Like current, reward and rating and promotion traveled hidden paths to reach each person's judgment. And at the end of one of those paths lay the thing that had once driven me into the justice sickness.
Norms Are the Map, Wiring Is the Current
When I was an examiner, I believed in the wording of the rules. People should act as written; if they don't, that's a violation. As an executive I learned there was a valley between the wording and the floor. But from the seat of governance the valley's nature came clear. The rules are only a map framed on the wall. What actually moves people was a current running quite apart from that map.
What is the current? The monthly rating sheet. The bonus formula. The path to promotion. The metric that asks "how many did you process this term." Who is allowed to speak in the meeting, and who is hushed. These move a person's hands and feet. While the rules say "this is how it ought to be," the wiring quietly commands "this is what gets rewarded." People recite the former and obey the latter.
The rules decide what people say; the wiring decides what people do.
I once called the gap between word and deed hypocrisy, and judged it. I see it differently now. The gap is not a flaw of character. It is simply how the wiring diagram was drawn.
The Wiring That Made Me Sick
I placed my old self on the diagram. And then why I had clung so hard to enforcement could be explained not by character but by circuitry.
Rated by rejections
An examiner's work was counted by "how many you stopped." Items passed were invisible; only items stopped became merit. The wiring told me to hunt for reasons to stop.
Only the miss was punished
Over-stopping drew no rebuke. One missed item brought accountability. The asymmetry of punishment tilted me toward seeing white as black.
Leaving gray meant incompetent
"Judgment withheld" read as a lack of decisiveness. So I forced gray into white or black. I did not lack meta-cognition. The wiring punished meta-cognition.
Where the three paths converged, there sat the sickness. The justice sickness was not born of weakness in my heart. It grew because the wiring around me poured reward onto that behavior. This is not absolution. It is diagnosis. As long as the cause is laid at character, the next examiner falls ill the same way. Until the wiring is redrawn, the sickness recurs, changing only the host.
Excess and Health Run From the Same Power Source
What surprised me was the discovery that overreaching enforcement and genuine health do not come from separate sources. Both run from the same power source — the wiring of incentives. Only the direction of the current differs.
| Aspect | Wiring that breeds the sickness | Wiring that breeds health |
|---|---|---|
| What is counted | Number stopped | Quality of rightly passing and rightly stopping |
| Direction of punishment | Punishes only the miss | Questions both over-enforcement and the miss |
| Handling of gray | Withholding read as incompetent | Withholding and consulting read as competent |
| Handling of silence | The dissenter loses | The dissenter is rewarded |
| Time horizon | Sees only this term's count | Sees the trust of years ahead |
The same human, depending on the wiring, becomes either an enforcer or a thoughtful advocate. So the heart of the governance work was not drafting fine rules. It was redrawing the direction of the current. I opened the rating sheets one by one and read what each commanded of a person. The organization's true intent lived not in its prose but in its formulas.
The Wiring Is Invisible Even to Oneself
The hardest part is that the wiring is invisible to the one who follows it. A person feels himself an agent acting on conviction. He does not think he is following a path of reward. So when asked "why did you do that," he answers in the language of the rules. The real reason — because it was rewarded — sinks beneath awareness.
I myself, as an examiner, was certain I judged "because it was right." Had the wiring been visible, I should have noticed I was judging for the count. I did not. Wiring is laid so that those who follow it cannot see it. That is why the seat of governance must be the seat that sees the wiring on a person's behalf. To rely on individual conscience is to hand over the map and leave the current unattended.
The Justice Disease III ── Map of all 10 episodes
- Vol. 1: Taking the Seat ── The View from Governance ── A former reviewer reaches the summit of governance and sees the organization, for the first time, as a single living creature.
- Vol. 2: Rules Are an Effect ── The Culture Downstream of Norms ── Rules are downstream of culture. Edit the clause and behavior stays the same; the river runs from custom to code.
- Vol. 3 (this episode): The Wiring Diagram ── Incentives Decide Behavior ── Norms don't move people; the wiring of pay, ratings, and promotion does. Who gets rewarded for what produces both overpolicing and health.
- Vol. 4: The Boardroom's Blind Spot ── The highest seat widens the view and carves a new blind spot — where reports die climbing and unanimity becomes the sound of an eye closing.
- Vol. 5: The Valley Between the Stated and the Real ── From the seat of oversight, the deep valley where stated values part ways from daily conduct
- Vol. 6: Beyond Hunting for Violations ── Designing the Conditions in Which Judgment Grows ── From catching violations to cultivating the soil where good judgment grows on its own — the turn at the heart of governance.
- Vol. 7: The Whistle as a Mirror ── The volume and silence of internal reports mirror an organization's health.
- Vol. 8: Organizational Metacognition ── When a Company Sees Itself ── Scaling personal metacognition to the organization: how a company observes and corrects its own biases and blind spots, seen from the seat of governance.
- Vol. 9: My Former Self, Now Visible ── From the governance seat, he finds his old black-and-white reviewer self — that righteousness, too, was a product of wiring and culture.
- Vol. 10 (final): The Governor's Every Day a Good Day ── Doubting oneself from the highest seat. What we guard is not the rules but people's judgment and the density of trust. Quiet days of self-watching.
What became visible from the seat of governance was the wiring diagram of reward, rating, and promotion running quietly behind the words the organization proclaims. What makes people good or bad is not preaching but the direction of this circuit. Recite fine rules a hundred times; if the wiring points the other way, people walk the other way.
I once judged people in black and white. What I see now is that even that black and white was a lamp lit by the wiring around me. The thing to judge was not the person but the circuit. I set down the pen that drafts rules and begin to reach into the formulas. An organization's conscience dwells not in its prose but in who gets rewarded for what.
- Norms are the map, wiring is the current. Not framed wording but the paths of rating, bonus, and promotion decide real behavior. People recite the former and obey the latter.
- The justice sickness too was a product of wiring. Rating by rejection count, punishing only the miss, treating withheld judgment as incompetent — three paths poured reward onto over-enforcement.
- Excess and health run from the same power source. The heart of governance is redrawing who gets rewarded for what, not drafting finer rules.
- Steven Kerr On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B Academy of Management Journal, 1975. (The classic on the perversity of reward systems that pay for A while hoping for B)
- W. Edwards Deming Out of the Crisis MIT Press, 1986. (Argues individual ratings wreck system optimization, anticipating the wiring problem)
- Edgar H. Schein Organizational Culture and Leadership Jossey-Bass, 1985. (Analyzes how the allocation of reward and status shapes the reality of culture)
- Chris Argyris Teaching Smart People How to Learn Harvard Business Review, 1991. (The gap between espoused theory and theory-in-use; double-loop learning)
- Amy C. Edmondson The Fearless Organization Wiley, 2018. (Psychological safety that does not punish dissent or withholding changes the quality of behavior)
- Lynn Sharp Paine Managing for Organizational Integrity Harvard Business Review, 1994. (Argues the shift from rule-management to an integrated approach to integrity)