John Calhoun's experiment is often retold as a parable about the dangers of comfort. Give mice everything, the story goes: food, warmth, safety. And they degenerate. The lesson for managers sounds something like “don't spoil people”.
That conclusion is wrong. And I know why. Because I have seen a real “Universe 25” from the inside. More than once.
Calhoun created ideal conditions: food, water, climate control and no predators. But they also came with an enclosed space, no way out, no evolution of social norms and no privacy. The population grew at first, then began to disintegrate: aggression, isolation and the disappearance of parenting. Strangest of all, the so-called “beautiful ones” appeared. Individuals who stopped participating in the colony's life. Neither aggressive nor broken, simply withdrawn. Well-groomed, calm and utterly empty. Calhoun called this a behavioral sink, a downward spiral of behavioural degradation.
The popular interpretation says: comfort is to blame.
The real cause is different: the system destroyed social bonds. Roles became blurred, interactions became unmanageable, and status became detached from real contribution. At that point, not participating became the rational strategy.
The “beautiful ones” exist. I have seen them. The larger the company, the more of them there are.
At a large IT organisation linked to a well-known convenience-store chain, I saw a project that cost more than 20 million rubles. Its output was a presentation about the project. For months, people spent the budget preparing for the next reporting meeting. No real work, just preparation for the next report and work on looking impressive in slides.
At a certain green bank, teams building analytics platforms spent years developing products they knew would not work. People said so openly in the smoking area. At demos, however, they talked about the difficult journey and their achievements. Nobody on the team believed in success. Only the product lead pretended during reports that their existence was justified. The entire cluster simply used Power BI and ignored them.
At a certain blue brokerage, the scale was unprecedented. Around 120 million rubles a quarter went to projects whose reports claimed a platform was being built. In reality, students overwhelmed by their assignments were haphazardly writing a monolith with a huge legacy codebase that nobody knew what to do with. Budgets were allocated, the contractor was owed an enormous amount of money, but out of loyalty kept believing payment would come and somehow kept the project going.
The “beautiful ones” are not a case of moral decline or laziness.
They are a rational adaptation to a toxic system.
When status is no longer linked to real contribution, the only smart strategy is to look busy and avoid taking risks.
The experiment reached a point beyond which the system could no longer recover. Even if all the negative factors were removed, the population did not revive. I have seen such a point in real life.
I returned from holiday to a team that, in my absence, my manager had publicly humiliated, shouted at, threatened and sworn at over bugs in a release. Half the team had handed in their resignations. In the same incident, he tried to blame me.
Before that incident, the team had delivered every task on time for a year and a half, sometimes early. Processes ran like clockwork. People were close-knit.
I held every possible 1-to-1, brought in HR and talked to everyone. Nothing worked. People did not believe anything would change, and they were right. Within six months, everyone had left. I became so demoralised myself that I involved the internal investigations team and the prosecutor's office. The conflict was hushed up by paying me money.
The sign of a point of no return is not aggression or conflict. It is when people stop believing that anything can be fixed.
Every time I joined a large company, I entered an environment that tried to break me from the first days. I learned not to wait for the environment to change on its own, and began building in an antidote.
Tea ceremonies: meetings built around “what have you done this sprint as a person, rather than as a role?” What films you watched, what song you wrote, whether you ran a marathon. It sounds frivolous, but it has a serious effect. People need to see one another as people, rather than functions.
Lectures and guest speakers on stress and culture. On how a bug is a lesson, not a catastrophe. On how putting people under pressure is counterproductive. Gamification and a common opponent: sometimes we literally picked a competitor to “fight against”, to spark enthusiasm when nothing else could. Shared events outside the office: closeness is not built at status meetings.
I have never yet managed to design an entire environment. Honestly, I had never explicitly set myself that task. But now I understand: that is the main task.
People are living beings. It sounds obvious, but management forgets it all the time.
At a given moment, people may genuinely lack the motivation to complete tasks at the pace the business stakeholder expects. That is not sabotage; it is reality. It needs to be factored in as a risk. It matters to understand how motivated each person is right now. Whether the current team has a chance of handling the crisis, or whether it needs to be restructured.
It matters to lead by example. Not to take all responsibility onto yourself, but to show the team that we can win, take pride in our work, make mistakes without falling apart, learn quickly and grow. You need to find fuel for ambitious goals within the group. And protect that group from management pressure, attacks by neighbouring teams and a system configured by default to grind it down.
“Universe 25” is not about comfort. It is about systems dying when the people inside them no longer have a reason to be human.
Evidence-based management does not begin with motivational speeches.
It begins with the question: what kind of environment am I building right now?