The Panopticon Paradox: Balancing Oversight and Empowerment in Leadership

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Who will watch the Watchmen? A question asked in the 1st or 2nd century by the Roman poet Juvenal in the Satires *Satire VI, lines 347 – 348).

Even though this phrase now refers to many things such as police and judicial overreach and corruption, or dealing with oppressive governments and dictatorships, in Juvenal’s context it meant something we still struggle with.

That is how difficult it is to enforce moral behaviour on women when those people charged with enforcing the behaviour (Custodes) are not above incorruptible.

Who Is Watching?

Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher, social reformer, and founder of utilitarianism, in 1785, went to visit his brother Samuel in Krichev, which was part of the Russian Empire.

The trip turned into a two-year stay. During that time, he created and expanded on an idea with his brother about the Panopticon.

A prison, where one guard could constantly observe all of the prisoners but the prisoners couldn’t see the guard. Allowing one person to watch over everyone because the prisoners never knew where the guard was looking.

Bentham thought that if the prisoners couldn’t tell if they were being watched or not they would have to follow the rules assuming they were being watched.

Watching The Watchers

The watching didn’t stop with the guard. Bentham’s idea was that the person running the prison also had to be observed from time to time by the general public.

The guard had a duty of care for the inmates and was meant to keep the prison as humanely as possible. So they needed to have observation from the public to make sure that the guard was acting the public good.

Feels Pretty Similar

Being watched sounds like something we all go through today.

We exist in a similar state. Fears that everything is being monitored by our employer. The pushback from the work from home movement where management are afraid if someone isn’t watching you work then you won’t work.

What does that say about them?

Does the management class think that they operate on a different planet and are above all of that or do they not do any work unless their boss is watching them?

Lead People

The idea of the Panopticon was to find a way to look after a lot of people without needing a lot of oversight.

It has been twisted into this sinister prison where one all-powerful person sits silently, watching intensely for any wrongdoing. Ready to unleash justice on any poor soul deemed to have broken the rules.

This doesn’t seem like the intent of what Bentham was trying to do.

I also think it is a terrible model for leadership.

The perfect situation is that everyone does what they should do because that is the culture and the way. If we have to sit over people to make them do their work then we have hired the wrong people.

Leadership is not babysitting. It is letting people out into the wild, but training them on how to act.

We want to prepare the kids for the road, not prepare the road for the kids.

Ultimately, Bentham’s idea didn’t get support and it was never made. He was frustrated by this for the rest of his life. He thought the idea was killed by the king and the elite aristocrats.

He developed the idea of Sinister Interest, that the minority of powerful parties act in a way against the interests of the wider public.

An interesting way to think of things if you consider the current struggle between labour and management we still go through.