Tech companies adopt C&C governance through isomorphic mimicry: copying a governance model from industries where it works without verifying that the preconditions hold.
C&C governance succeeds in pharma (structured, quantifiable trial data), aviation (checklists refined by decades of failure analysis), and manufacturing (metrics that genuinely proxy for operational reality). Tech companies see this success and adopt the same model. The mimicry is rational on the surface: if it works for large complex organizations in other domains, it should work here.
The fallacy: C&C’s success in those industries depends on specific information-theoretic conditions — compression, proxy validity, and separability. Tech structurally violates all three. The mimicry copies the governance structure without inheriting the conditions that make it work.
This is a specific instance of DiMaggio & Powell’s institutional isomorphism (1983), but the contribution here is diagnosing what exactly is being lost in the copy: not cultural fit or org size, but the information pipeline’s ability to support centralized decision-making. The preconditions are invisible to the people doing the copying because they’re structural, not procedural.