Every institution has a purpose. Schools exist to educate, hospitals to care for patients, companies to serve customers, governments to manage citizens. These statements feel obvious — and yet, over time, purpose can quietly shift.
One way to see that shift is through the lens of optimisation.
Defining Optimisation
An optimisation system is a set of practices and procedures designed to improve performance according to measurable indicators. It has four essential features:
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Declared purpose: Every system starts with a goal, often tied to a beneficiary.
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Metrics: The system develops measures that indicate whether the goal is being achieved.
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Improvement: Decisions, processes, and actions are adjusted to increase performance according to the metrics.
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Self-reinforcement: Over time, the system reorganises around the metrics, intensifying their centrality.
Metrics Are Not the Same as Purpose
Here is the subtlety. Metrics are never identical to the purpose they represent. Test scores are not the same as learning. Patient throughput is not the same as well-being. Quarterly earnings are not the same as customer satisfaction. Electoral polls are not the same as citizen engagement.
Yet in practice, what can be measured often begins to dominate what is valued. The proxy becomes the target. The map becomes the territory.
This is the first clue to the quiet power — and risk — of optimisation.
Optimisation in Everyday Life
Optimisation is not just a technical concept. It shapes how we experience institutions:
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Schools increasingly organise around test scores rather than holistic education.
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Hospitals prioritise efficiency metrics alongside care.
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Companies orient strategy toward revenue and market share.
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Governments rely on data analytics, risk modelling, and performance indicators to make decisions.
In each case, measurable indicators facilitate coordination, transparency, and accountability. They also begin to reorient the system’s attention and energy.
The System That Forgets Its Beneficiary
When optimisation is highly developed, the original beneficiary may recede from the centre. This is not a moral failing; it is a structural property.
Consider a government. Its declared purpose is to serve citizens. Its metrics might include economic growth, employment statistics, or approval ratings. Over time, operations may focus more on improving these indicators than on fostering active participation or deliberation. Citizens remain present, but the system optimises for its own stability and continuity.
A corporation shows the same pattern. Its declared purpose is to provide goods or services to customers. Its metric becomes shareholder return. Customers remain essential, but primarily as contributors to the metric, not as the structural centre.
Why This Matters
The first insight is simple but profound:
The fact that a system continues to function does not guarantee that it functions for the benefit of the people it claims to serve.
Optimisation allows systems to endure. It allows them to appear responsive, adaptive, and effective. Yet their focus may drift from the original purpose to the performance metric itself.
The quiet unsettling emerges here: we participate in these systems, believing we are their beneficiaries, while the structural centre of gravity may have shifted elsewhere.
Setting the Stage
This is the conceptual foundation for the series. We will examine how optimisation logic has spread across domains:
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Corporations and financial systems
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Universities and education
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Healthcare and social services
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Media and communication
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Even our own interior lives, as metrics and performance tracking shape behavior
The goal is not to demonise these systems. The goal is to reveal their structural logic. To see how metrics, once tools, can become the organising principle — and what that implies for participation, agency, and the shaping of possibility.
Optimisation is neither inherently good nor bad. It is a lens. It is a force. And if we look closely, we may begin to see the same pattern repeating across the institutions that structure our world.
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