Putt's Law

Biological Parallel

Putt's Law describes competence inversion: managers don't understand what they manage, and workers don't manage what they understand. Biology reveals this is structural, not failure. In honeybee colonies, the queen produces 3,000 eggs daily but cannot forage—her ovaries are hypertrophied, her foraging instincts suppressed. Workers forage expertly but have underdeveloped ovaries and can't sustain the queen's reproductive function. Each caste is physically incompetent at the other's role by design. Termite soldiers show an even starker inversion: their mandibles are so enlarged for defense that they cannot feed themselves. Despite being the colony's military specialists, soldiers depend entirely on workers for nutrition—receiving pre-digested food mouth-to-mouth through trophallaxis. The worker-to-soldier transition is irreversible; mandibles hypertrophy to the point where chewing cellulose becomes anatomically impossible. Soldiers defend but cannot eat; workers eat but cannot defend with that ferocity. Mutual incompetence is locked into jaw morphology. In naked mole rat colonies, the queen is larger with a lengthened spine to accommodate continuous breeding. Workers are smaller, optimized for tunneling and foraging. The queen couldn't fit through the narrow burrows she commands workers to dig; workers couldn't sustain her reproductive output of 30+ pups per year. This is division of labor's inevitable endpoint: extreme specialization creates mutual incompetence. Coordinators and specialists genuinely cannot perform each other's functions because their anatomy, neural wiring, and behavior repertoire are optimized exclusively for their roles. This isn't organizational failure—it's the price of hierarchical efficiency. Every eusocial colony exhibits Putt's Law: those who coordinate cannot execute specialized tasks, and those who execute cannot coordinate the system.