Illusion of Control in Business
Sarah Jons 
Control is one of our greatest illusions as humans, business leaders and pedestrians. You may have a lucky number
Control is one of our greatest illusions as humans, business leaders and pedestrians. You may have a lucky number, believe there is significance in random events or even believe that pressing a pedestrian crossing button will actually do something.
Dr. Claire Lewicki: Control is an illusion, you infantile egomaniac. Nobody knows what’s gonna happen next: not on a freeway, not in an airplane, not inside our own bodies and certainly not on a racetrack with 40 other infantile egomaniacs.
Actually the pedestrian crossing button not being connected is not such an absurd theory. In New York, there are indeed placebo buttons, as in many locations they appear to have no effect. But in the UK does pushing the button make any difference? Well actually it depends (the answer in a moment).
But we all like to be in control- well mostly. Others expect leaders, managers, or owners to have influence over business success. This is normal and it can be good. Especially if the manager or business owner is good at managing systems and processes.The illusion of control rests at the heart of superstitious and pseudoscientific beliefs. It is a belief that we are controlling events, which, are actually occurring independently of our behaviour.
This is a very common illusion that occurs in most people, particularly when desired events occur frequently though uncontrollably. When you think you control something, you are generally wrong. You can have some control of some things, but total control is not achievable. We constantly make plans that never actually turn out the way we envisioned.
The term control freak is used (usually in a bad way) for a person who attempts to dictate how everything around them is done. The phrase was first used in the late 1960s — an era when great stress was laid on the principle of ‘doing one’s own thing’ and letting others do the same.
Steve Jobs was a perfectionist who favoured the closed system of control over all aspects of a product from start to finish – what he termed the integrated over the fragmented approach. As Steve Wozniak, his long-term collaborator and occasional critic, put it: Apple gets you into their playpen and keeps you there. The triumph of the PC over the Mac was a blow for that philosophy, a situation which was then reversed by the serial successes of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad – only for the Android challenge to reopen the debate again.
The illusion of control is also the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events; for example, it occurs when someone feels a sense of control over outcomes that they demonstrably do not influence. It can be produced in experimental participants using points in a video game, lights and tones that turn on or off independently of the participant’s attempts to control them, spontaneous remissions of pain in fictitious patients in a computer game, or fictitious stock prices that can rise or not as a function of several potential (and fictitious as well) causes. In all these cases people tend to think that they have control over the events they are trying to obtain even when those events have been programmed to occur following a predetermined sequence.
In real life this often leads to poor decision-making based on coincidences and cognitive illusions rather than contrasted knowledge. It affects areas as diverse as health, finance, or education. This illusion rests at the heart of pseudoscientific practices and superstitious thinking. Even the best business leaders make mistakes, judge issues incorrectly, or over-estimate their abilities to control things. Sometimes, however, the mistakes are made because the individual is so good and because others rely on them. Prior success builds confidence. Sometimes, over-confidence. Sometimes, they fall victim to the illusion of control.
The illusion of control rears its head when we overestimate our abilities to influence an outcome. You can know it has happened when you look back and realise that, despite thinking you had the ability to affect the situation, you really were not in a position to influence the result. Practically, this can cause leaders to underestimate effort, cost, and resource requirements. It can also lead to overestimation of profits, market share, or other outcome indicators.
Like pressing that pedestrian crossing button ….
if it’s a busy junction, anywhere in the UK, you might see people who don’t bother pressing. Ask them and they’ll tell you it doesn’t do anything.
Ok let’s clear this up. At a ‘stand alone’ pedestrian crossing in the UK, unconnected to a junction, the button will turn a traffic light red. Yes, absolutely.
But let’s take one very busy crossing – at the intersection between Kingsway and High Holborn in London- and you immediately start to doubt the button’s efficacy. Sometimes people press it, sometimes they don’t. In both cases there is a 105-second interval between the red man coming on and the green man appearing. At night, the button does act to stop the traffic, says Transport for London. But this is only between the hours of midnight and 07:00.
In the daytime, the button has no effect. Doh!
Transport for London (TFL) denies it is misleading people. There are 4,650 pedestrian crossings in London of which about 2,500 are at junctions. At the majority of these junctions the button controls the green man. There is also a theory that pressing the close button in a lift (elevator) doesn’t work. Gizmodo, more recently, contends that:
…the Door Close button is there mostly to give passengers the illusion of control. In elevators built since the early ’90s. The button is only enabled in emergency situations with a key held by an authority.
Total control is an illusion. Our attempts to control the world can be seen through
- You are not in total control of the way you feel. If you were, then you could just stop being anxious and stop worrying about everything right now and never be anxious again.
- you are not in total control of your behaviours. If you were, then you could stop blinking your eyes while being awake for the next 5 hours.
- Trying to control how our children turn out, as if we can shape them like blocks of clay, as if humans aren’t more complex than we can possibly understand.
- Tracking every little thing, from spending to exercise to what we eat to what tasks we do to how many visitors are on our site to how many steps we’ve taken today and how many miles we’ve run. As if our selective tracking can possibly include the many, complex factors that influence outcomes.
- you are not in total control of your own mind. If you were, then you would not think of a pink elephant when I tell you not to think of a pink elephant, but I will bet you money that you thought of one.
- Trying to control employees — again, complex human beings with many motivations and whims and habits that we don’t understand.
We are all human and can make mistakes. In our complex world, it is difficult to know everything and judge all situations accurately (just scan the business headlines over the past few years for proof). Having an obsession of wanting to control everything is like a disease, it can stress you out, and it will almost always lead to you being a lonely, unsuccessful person. So maybe the only type of control you should be practicing is self-control. You are the only person you can control, so instead of focusing on what might happen, and trying to control the future, focus on controlling yourself so that you can become a more successful individual.
Since control is just an illusion, focus on taking charge of your own life, so that you can better yourself, and leave the uncontrollable to Transport for London.
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