04/23/2026
{discussion in Elder's Quorum on whether or not calling out leaders to beware of 'just checking the box' is good / useful / harmful...}
One of the challenges with “checking the box”-style of management is that it is very susceptible to the The Cobra Principle, where focusing on the measure can result in greater efforts to reach the measure, rather than the actual intended outcome **beyond** the measure.
The Cobra Principle derives from an (apocryphal?) story in colonial India.
When faced with a surging population of invasive cobra snakes, the British government announced a new program that would surely solve it — a new cash bounty for every dead snake turned into local officials.
The poor people responded as expected, rounding up and killing snakes with greater effort than before, working together as communities to eradicate nests, reaching out to make sure no stone was left unturned.
But officials were surprised to find that, even after several months of sustained, diligent effort, dead snakes were being turned in for bounties. ‘Surely the snake population would have decreased by now?’ they thought. ‘Where are all these snakes coming from? are there hidden nests we couldn’t see? was the problem worse than we’d originally thought? are they coming in from across the border?’
It turns out that, yes, the cobras were coming from nests the officials couldn’t see.
They were coming from the locals themselves.
The townsfolk realized that the cash reward they received from turning in dead cobras was an easy source of income, and they’d be willing to live with a contained problem (their own nests) in order to continuously reach the desired outcome (rewards for dead cobras.) Rather than focusing on exterminating, the townsfolk were just farming money.
So what did the officials do? They stopped the bounty program and went back to the drawing board.
And what do you guess the townsfolk did, now that there was no reward for dead cobras?
That’s right — they just turned them loose to let ‘someone else…’ deal with them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Resulting in even more cobras than there were before.
The Cobra Principle: when the intended solution to a problem actually makes the problem worse due to perverse incentives and focusing on the wrong behavior.
If you focus heavily on The Measure™️, you run the risk of behavior adjusting to merely meet the measure, even in negative methods, rather than the original positive intended outcome.
So when people call out “Hey, let’s be careful that we’re not merely ‘checking the box…’, perhaps let’s not be so ready to judge them as 'aggrieving the spirit', or 'being prideful', or 'using unrighteous judgement', or being a critic.
They’re actually trying to help you, in the same way that a warning signal from your dashboard is telling you that something is wrong.
Don’t shut down feedback from the quorum.
If you find yourself feeling defensive, upset, bothered, or otherwise perturbed that someone called you out for ‘checking the box’…you need to take that as good information useful for reflection and adjustment, rather than throwing it back in their face with a ‘stop being prideful and judgmental.’
Because that’s an instant way to lose followers, disengage your brethren, and continue the long slow fading out of their faith and partnership.
