An organization’s own justifying standard becomes the gauge it is later punished on.

Evidence

However, sometimes the Authority was forced to invest in rail projects that would never be self-financing (Walsh, 1978). The Authority set this self-financing principle as a standard by which it justified its projects; yet its statutes implied that others could define which projects the Authority had to adopt. The ailing PATH rail project was a cuckoo’s egg that the state legislators forced the Authority to accept. Yet because the PA had always proudly asserted that its projects were self-supporting, its financial performance was judged on that basis – even if the Authority now had to account for rail-transit deficits that were not its fault. During the 1960s, the Authority gradually lost support for its existing achievements because it had to raise the toll rates to cover the expenses of the ailing railroad system. — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 300

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A compact theory of self-imposed metrics turning into traps: the principle that won legitimacy becomes the instrument of its loss.
• BMF: The ‘cuckoo’s egg’ framing — an obligation forced into a host body that then feeds on its resources — obliquely evokes the coerced, self-consuming institutional burdens borne by the protagonist in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower’s community institutions.