Manageability trap

The Manageability Trap: How the Focus on the Tractable Obscures the Ethical and Existential

Kuruvilla Pandikattu SJ
Chair Professor, JRD Tata Foundation for Business Ethics, XLRI Jamshedpur

Abstract

This article explores the "Manageability Trap"—a cognitive and organizational pattern in which leaders, overwhelmed by complexity, focus on what is actionable and avoid confronting what is significant. Drawing from organizational sociology, behavioral psychology, and philosophical ethics, it argues that by over-optimizing manageable tasks, institutions inadvertently neglect broader moral responsibilities and long-term existential challenges. The article further integrates Parkinson’s Law—the idea that work expands to fill the time available—to show how time and attention are consumed by the trivial, often at the expense of the transformative.

Introduction

In our hyper-productive, outcome-driven organizational world, there is an insidious tendency to conflate what is manageable with what is important. This phenomenon, which I call the Manageability Trap, refers to the inclination of individuals and institutions to focus narrowly on tractable problems while ignoring or postponing engagement with larger systemic or ethical issues. In doing so, organizations risk cultivating environments of procedural busyness that obscure deeper responsibilities—environmental, social, or moral.

We live in a time marked by ecological collapse, technological disruption, and rising inequalities. Yet in many boardrooms and classrooms, what captures attention are quarterly targets, compliance checklists, and measurable efficiencies. These are not inherently wrong. The danger lies in allowing them to displace the ethical imagination and strategic foresight needed to address long-range concerns.

The Psychology and Sociology of Manageability

Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein’s (1999) notion of the availability cascade explains how repeated ideas gain momentum and crowd out deeper reflection. Similarly, cognitive tunneling—a concept drawn from behavioral economics (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013)—demonstrates how scarcity of cognitive resources leads individuals to fixate on immediate, solvable problems while ignoring long-term goals. In this narrowed mental bandwidth, existential concerns become invisible—not because they are unimportant, but because they are too complex or overwhelming to process.

Organizations exhibit the same pattern. Diane Vaughan (1996), in her study of the Challenger disaster, introduced the term normalization of deviance, which shows how small procedural shortcuts become institutional norms simply because they produce no immediate failure. What begins as an exception soon becomes the rule.

These cognitive and institutional biases converge to form the Manageability Trap. Leaders focus on KPIs, dashboards, and cost-saving measures because these provide clarity and control. Meanwhile, deeper issues—organizational culture, climate ethics, human dignity—are displaced into the background.

Parkinson’s Law and the Illusion of Progress

The British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson (1955) famously observed that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." In other words, we rarely run out of tasks—we run out of time to prioritize what matters. The modern professional is drowning in activity: meetings, emails, reports, deadlines. In this busyness, the opportunity to reflect on values, revisit vision, or confront moral dilemmas is postponed indefinitely.

MBA students and managers alike are trained to optimize, execute, and deliver. But optimization without orientation can become a form of ethical blindness. Parkinson’s Law, when coupled with the Manageability Trap, creates a closed loop: endless tasks consume available time, and because only the tractable can be executed, the system avoids the profound.

This explains why, despite years of ESG policies and corporate social responsibility rhetoric, systemic change remains elusive. The problem is not lack of effort—but lack of ethical depth and strategic attentiveness to the whole.

The Ethical Cost of Compartmentalization

The Manageability Trap also draws from the psycho-organizational dynamic of compartmentalization—the ability to separate moral identities across roles (Jackall, 1988). A CEO may promote sustainability on stage while signing off on extractive contracts in private. An HR executive may endorse diversity while tolerating exclusion. These fractures are not always intentional. They are byproducts of environments that reward what is visible and punish what is reflective.

In such cultures, there is little incentive to ask the big questions: What is the purpose of this organization? What is the long-term harm we are complicit in? Who is excluded by our definition of success? These are not abstract concerns. They are the moral architecture upon which sustainable leadership is built.

Reclaiming Ethical Imagination

Breaking free from the Manageability Trap requires reclaiming moral and strategic imagination. This means cultivating leaders who can hold complexity, tolerate ambiguity, and prioritize justice even when it resists metrics. It also means embedding ethical foresight into everyday routines—pausing to ask not just What can we do? but What should we do?

Time must be structured not only around deadlines but around deliberation. This may involve structured reflective spaces, values-based decision frameworks, or revisiting mission and vision statements regularly—not as marketing tools but as ethical compasses.

In practical terms, this might mean resisting the urge to "close the loop" quickly. It may mean slowing down to listen to stakeholders, to consider long-term consequences, or to question inherited norms. Ethics, after all, is not an add-on. It is the soul of strategic clarity.

Implications for Business Education

For MBA students, the Manageability Trap poses a critical learning challenge. Management education must go beyond skill acquisition to teach ethical discernment. Students must be equipped not just to solve problems but to identify which problems are worth solving, which silences are worth breaking, and which norms must be questioned.

This calls for a pedagogy that integrates ethics into core strategic thinking—not as a week in the syllabus, but as a mode of inquiry across courses. Faculty must model the intellectual discipline of resisting premature closure, and encourage students to confront what is difficult, systemic, and long-range.

Conclusion

The Manageability Trap is not merely a managerial inefficiency—it is a moral failure in slow motion. It is the tragedy of the urgent eclipsing the important, of procedural mastery replacing ethical orientation. As institutions grow more complex and crises more global, the need for morally imaginative leadership becomes existential.

We do not suffer from a lack of solutions—we suffer from a lack of ethical vision. And ethical vision requires space: space in our calendars, in our minds, and in our conversations. It is time to stop asking only, What can we manage? and start asking, What must we not ignore?

References

Jackall, R. (1988). Moral Mazes: The world of corporate managers. Oxford University Press.

Kuran, T., & Sunstein, C. R. (1999). Availability cascades and risk regulation. Stanford Law Review, 51(4), 683–768.

Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Times Books.

Parkinson, C. N. (1955). Parkinson’s Law. The Economist.

Vaughan, D. (1996). The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA. University of Chicago Press.