Machine for Killing Your Best Ideas

You built a model of your executive’s judgment so you could pre-clear every idea before it reaches them.

Take an executive whose yes or no gates everything, watch enough of their decisions, and fit a model to the pattern. Now you have an oracle. Run every idea past the clone, advance the ones it approves, and never burn a real meeting on a doomed proposal again. Faster loops, less friction, a happier executive.

It works and that create new problem if you think as System Thinker.

How IT WORKS

Strip the magic away and the clone is a filter: a function from an idea to a predicted approval. To see why that’s dangerous, ask what approval was ever for. Nobody wants approvals. They want outcomes. 

Approval is a stand-in — a lossy compression of “this will probably work, and it fits where we’re going” down to a single bit. The executive is already a proxy for the goal, real test has multiple dimensions and latent factors that you never know.

The clone is a proxy for the executive. You are now optimizing two hops from anything real, and every hop throws away signal.

Upside is real ( Illusion)

Which is exactly what makes this hard to argue against. Cycle time collapses — you get an instant read and iterate against it instead of waiting days for a verdict. 

Executive’s attention stops being spent adjudicating obvious non-starters. And building the clone forces something genuinely useful: to fit the model, someone has to name what actually drives a yes. The criteria come out of the executive’s head and onto the page, and the model is often clearer about the real rules than the person is.

That legibility is worth having on its own. If the story ended here, this would simply be a good tool. It doesn’t end here.

A clone can only recognize the future by its resemblance to the past.

How clone fails

Once clone is the gate that every idea must clear, and few things happen. None of them is the thing you or company wanted.

GoodHART Law

As per GoodHart law ,the moment “looks approvable” becomes the target, it stops measuring quality. You are now running gradient descent on the proxy — producing proposals optimized to please a model, which is a different thing from proposals that work. We see this in every industry.

Variance Collapse

Clone recognizes the future only by its resemblance to the past. Genuinely novel bets — the ones that don’t pattern-match a prior yes — die before a human sees them. You strip out the asymmetric upside and keep the safe, legible middle. In a fast domain, the middle is where returns go to die.

Atrophy ( RubberStamp)

If the clone is good, the real approvals become rubber stamps, because you only ever surface what it already predicts a yes on. The executive stops seeing raw idea flow — the exact input that kept their judgment calibrated. The map replaces the territory, and then no one is watching the territory.

Frozen Judgement

Last year’s executive approved last year’s ideas. The clone encodes that snapshot and enforces it going forward. You become faster at executing a judgment at the precise moment it goes stale — efficiency pointed the wrong way. Real world connection breaks.

Gaming

People learn what the clone likes and write to it. Proposals converge on a template. The organization gets fluent in “approvable” and forgets how to say “true.” Generative AI is amazing at cloning. I wrote post on how easy it is clone software now.

Lets get real

Everything above assumed the clone sits in front of a human — a filter you consult on the way to a real decision.

Now change one detail. The model isn’t hypothetical, and it isn’t waiting to be built. It’s installed. Decision-makers are already using it to say yes and no — on live proposals, today. The clone isn’t a draft of the gate. It is the gate.

Executive was a proxy for the goal so you cloned the executive. Now the executive consults the clone before deciding — so the human sits downstream of the model that was supposed to sit downstream of the human. 

We are moving towards world where clone has veto.