When a team stops believing in results: my experience and the metaphor of Universe 25

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 seems wrong to me. At work, I have seen several situations for which “Universe 25” became a vivid metaphor. This is my experience, not evidence that an experiment with mice can be extrapolated to humans.

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 Neither aggressive nor broken, simply withdrawn.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.
What interests me in this story is a different interpretation: 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.

Behaviour that reminds me of this metaphor does exist. I have encountered it in several large organisations. These observations cannot be used to judge all large companies.

At a large IT organisation linked to a well-known convenience-store chain, I saw a project whose costs I described in the original version of this account as more than 20 million rubles. The documents and basis for that figure are not published here. What I mainly saw of the project's output was a presentation. For months, people spent the budget preparing for the next reporting meeting. In my view, preparation for the next report and work on looking impressive in slides displaced substantive results. I cannot claim there was no other work at all.

At a certain green bank, teams spent years building analytics platforms whose functionality and usefulness I doubted. People spoke about this openly in the smoking area. At demos, however, they talked about the difficult journey and their achievements. In the conversations I heard, many doubted success. During reports, the product lead continued to talk about achievements; to me, this seemed detached from reality. In the part of the cluster I observed, people continued to use Power BI, and the new platforms did not become working tools.

At a certain blue brokerage, the scale was unprecedented. In the original version of this account, I cited around 120 million rubles per quarter for projects whose reports described platform development. The basis for that figure is not published here; it should not be read as an independently verified total. In my observations, young developers, including students, were overwhelmed by the complexity of the tasks and were writing a monolith with a large legacy codebase. I could not see an agreed plan for dealing with that legacy. Budgets were allocated, the contractor was owed an enormous amount of money, and continued to support the project while waiting for payment. Loyalty was my interpretation of that behaviour, not an established motive.

The “beautiful ones” are not a case of moral decline or laziness.
Such behaviour can be an adaptation to a toxic system.
When status is no longer tied to real contribution, displaying busyness may be more rewarding than taking risks for results.

The experiment reached a point beyond which the system could no longer recover. Retellings of the experiment often describe this stage as irreversible. I would not declare such a point scientifically established for a workplace team. But I have lived through a situation in which my actions could not restore trust.

I returned from holiday to a team after a conflict with my manager over bugs in a release. In my account of events, he publicly humiliated people, shouted, threatened and swore at them; I myself was on holiday at the time. Half the team 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 said they did not believe in change. Subsequent events, as I saw them, did not help rebuild that trust. 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 eventually ended with a payment to me. The circumstances of the proceedings are described here only from my side.

For me, an alarming sign of lost trust appears when people stop believing anything can be fixed. It deserves attention before aggression and open conflict begin.

In several large companies, I encountered an environment whose pressure I found very difficult 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 systemic rules and habits that can prevent it from working and growing.

“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?