The Glamour of Open Loops (An Engineering Perspective)

In engineering, an open loop system is a device that takes an input, executes an action, and never bothers to check if it worked.

It’s like throwing a paper airplane into the wind and calling it “delivery logistics.”

When management dresses this up as innovation, it’s usually because the control feedback would reveal uncomfortable truths — like the fact that the system doesn’t actually meet spec.

The underfunding isn’t an accident; it’s a design choice. Without proper sensors, telemetry, or validation, the system can appear to operate flawlessly… as long as no one looks too closely.

This is the engineering cousin of “plausible deniability.”

The system intends to work, and that intent becomes the performance metric. Forget actual results — if the actuator moved when the command was sent, we declare victory. The dangers are obvious to anyone who’s ever debugged a real system:

- No feedback loop → No error correction

- No error correction → Compounding drift and failure

- Compounding failure → Catastrophe hidden until it’s too late

Yet in the corporate theater of open loop design, this is spun as streamlined efficiency. No messy error handling, no budget wasted on instrumentation, no accountability in the logs. If you want a first principle here, it’s brutal in its simplicity:

An open loop without feedback is just a wish in the shape of a process.

It’s elegant in the same way a bridge without load testing is elegant — right up until someone drives across.