Cargo Cults

Copying the surface without the substance produces ritual, not results. Cargo cults take their name from Pacific islanders who, after Allied forces left post–WWII, built bamboo control towers and wooden aeroplanes to summon the cargo that had once arrived with the troops. They replicated the visible form — runways, headphones, hand signals — and expected the outcome. The mechanism that had actually produced the cargo (supply chains, industry, logistics) was absent. The ritual looked right and did nothing.

In organisations the same pattern recurs. Stand-up meetings, OKRs, open-plan offices, agile ceremonies: adopted because successful companies do them, without the conditions that make them work. The form is cargo; the mechanism is missing. The startup copies the pitch deck format of a unicorn but lacks distribution, product-market fit, or capital. The enterprise adopts "innovation labs" and "fail fast" without changing incentives or power structures. The ritual is performed. The cargo does not come.

Richard Feynman used "cargo cult science" to describe research that follows the procedures of science — peer review, statistics, jargon — without the core discipline: honesty about what would falsify the claim, rigorous experiment, and willingness to abandon the hypothesis. The trap is believing that performing the ritual causes the outcome when the outcome was produced by something else. The discipline is asking: what actually generates the result? If we can't answer, we're in cargo cult territory.