The Paradox of Control

When the U.S. Air Force developed rocket planes that could break the sound barrier, the pilots who flew them kept dying.

As planes reached speeds near Mach 2, pilots would lose control due to the thinner air in the upper atmosphere. As Tom Wolfe describes in his book The Right Stuff:

“A plane could skid into a flat spin… and then start tumbling, not spinning and not diving, but tumbling, end over end like a brick.”

You couldn’t maneuver out of a rocket plane tumble; anything you tried just made it worse. Pilots would claw desperately at the controls as they hurtled to their deaths, screaming into their radios: “I’ve tried A! I’ve tried B! I’ve tried C! I’ve tried D! Tell me what else I can try!” (Wolfe, page 99.) 

During one of those tumbles, a pilot named Chuck Yeager got knocked unconscious. By the time he came to, he had fallen to 25,000 feet… and in the lower, denser air, he could maneuver again. He was able to right the plane and land it safely.

It turns out that in the upper levels of our atmosphere, the most effective thing you can do with an out-of-control plane is to take your hands off the controls. It goes against all instincts, but letting go—literally, doing nothing—is the only real move you have.

While most of us in tech aren’t flying supersonic jets, we still encounter situations where control works and others where it doesn’t. Exerting too little or too much control can both cause problems, depending on the context. 

In psychology, when you attempt to control something that is ultimately uncontrollable, we call it “misapplied control.” As founders, it’s important to learn to recognize this pitfall and work with the underlying fear that drives it—the fear that things might go terribly, horribly wrong.

The trap of misapplied control

As humans, our brains evolved to help us better adapt to and control our environment. Other animals deal with winter by migrating or hibernating. Humans? We learned how to tame fire and make jackets out of goose feathers.

Because control is effective in so many situations, we can apply it in places where it doesn’t work. For entrepreneurs, I typically see this come up in their reaction to uncertainty—stressing about what might go wrong and how to respond to various imagined scenarios. Even when things are going well, I often hear founders say things like:

• “Will we be able to sustain this growth next quarter?”
• “Will this channel keep working to bring us leads?”
• “What if a competitor copies our core feature and gives it away for free?”

These worries are essentially a control strategy—an attempt to imagine the threats that may lie ahead so as to better navigate around them. To a degree, this kind of planning is helpful; it’s what enabled our species to adapt and survive in harsh environments.

However, no amount of planning can eliminate all risk. If you can’t tolerate uncertainty, you can end up fixated on trying to control what is fundamentally uncontrollable. For some this looks like rumination—it’s what causes founders to lie awake at night thinking about their businesses, unable to fall asleep. And it can lead us to act in other counterproductive ways: wasting our energy on excessive preparation, overwork, or micro-managing others. 

Noticing misapplied control

To move beyond misapplied control, you first have to recognize that you’re doing it. 

Attempts at control fall into two broad categories: external and internal. When faced with uncertainty, we try to manage our fears by taking external action or by trying to control our internal state.