Control Was Never About Command

To control something, originally, was to check it against the copy. The first meaning recorded in English is “to check the accuracy of, to verify”. Control was about bookkeeping. Someone kept the accounts, and someone else kept a second set, and the two were compared. The idea of control as domination and command came later.

The comptroller spelling is an accident too. Somebody decided the word must have come from the French compte, an account, and spelled it that way to look learned. It was wrong, but given the job, it was a reasonable guess.

Power has a different family. It comes through Old French from a Latin root meaning “to be able”, the same family as potent and possible. Its earliest meaning in English is ability: the strength and capacity to act. Power is what you can do. Control was a way of checking that what got done matched what was recorded.

That distinction is useful at work, because most of us have the two mixed up.

When a leader says they want “more control”, they usually mean more command: approving every decision, signing off every email. That isn’t control in the original sense. That’s grabbing the pen. The original controller didn’t do the work. They checked it against a reliable record and raised a flag when the two didn’t match.

Good control, in that sense, is quiet. It sets up the second roll, the measures, the dashboards, the regular review, and trusts people to do the work in between. It intervenes when the records diverge, not before. Bad control tries to keep the only roll, which means nothing can happen unless the controller is in the room.

There’s one more twist in the family. Rotulus, the little roll, also gave us role. In the theatre, an actor’s part was written on a roll of paper. Your role was your roll.

So a leader’s job isn’t to control everyone’s role in the modern sense. It’s to make sure there’s a second roll to check it against, and to read it.