What makes an incentive work?
An incentive works when it makes the behavior an organization needs attractive, legible, and sustainable—without rewarding the easiest proxy for that behavior.
Every metric changes the system it measures. A target for response time can improve responsiveness, or it can teach people to close difficult tickets early. A token reward can recognize contribution, or it can create a market for low-value activity. Good incentive design starts by modeling the behavior people can reasonably choose under real constraints.
Design questions we answer
- What value are we trying to create, and who can observe it?
- Which parts of the work are visible, delayed, collective, or hard to measure?
- What will a rational participant optimize if the metric becomes the target?
- How should rewards combine money, status, autonomy, access, and learning?
- What safeguards catch gaming, exclusion, collusion, or unhealthy competition?
Typical outputs
We create incentive maps, reward and recognition architectures, contribution taxonomies, evaluation criteria, scenario tests, and lightweight monitoring plans. The goal is not to eliminate self-interest; it is to make self-interest compatible with the system’s long-term purpose.
Incentives sit inside a wider system. Read about decision systems and coordination architecture, or talk to the researchers.