How organisations incentivise failure |
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Date | 2023-12-28 |
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This post is a short one about another antipattern that I’ve observed while working. Its technically an instance of a common antipattern of how locally optimised systems often don’t combine into systems that are optimised for the larger-scale goal. The particularly insidious part of this antipattern is that not only does it increase the risk of project failure, it also hurts team morale and individual’s mental health.
How to Incentivise Failure
The answer is quite simple: to incentivise project failure, make individual team members responsible for the work that they produce. Hang on an minute! isn’t that what we do in every company? shouldn’t people be responsible for their own actions?
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
Let’s follow this through with an example. Most tasks in businesses require multiple people to communicate together to produce the outcome of an analysis of some sort or make a decision. Indeed, the very logic behind the fact that we have organisations is that teams of people can produce things that individuals simply cannot.
In a normal run of the mill Taylorist organisation, the management create a work breakdown structure, until the overall task is broken up into chunks that can be completed in reasonable time by individuals. It is the job of the management to reward these individuals when they do a good job and punish them when they do a bad job. The management may also provide training to individuals to ensure that they understand what they’re supposed to be doing and can do it well.
so far so good.
But what happens when such an organisation is goes into a state of crisis or stress? The first thing to go is often the training. “We don’t have time/money to put you through training until the end of the project” say management. Stress also makes people grumpy. Managers, responsible for their team’s work, begin micromanaging their team members to avoid a perceived risk of disciplinary actions from higher management. Team members find themselves under more stress and disciplinary scrutiny. This is especially true when the long screwdrivers come out–when higher management start micromanaging.
The effects on individuals within a team are stark. Those who may not be skilled enough to do the work begin falling behind. Those who are comfortable with their workload often begin to gold-plate their output to gain praise from management when they could be helping out their colleagues. If the stress is too great, even those who are exceptional workers may find their deadlines are only just manageable. Because of Taylorist work breakdown methods that focus on the division of labour, if one or more individuals fail to deliver, the whole project has failed.
Failure of the project is incentivised.
This state is often know as crunch and it is well know in the games industry for producing buggy, unfinished products. Think Cyberpunk 2077 or any Bethesda game. Imagine what it does to systems like cars and aircraft where user’s life are on the line.
As Stafford Beer pointed out, many organisations become addicted to stress and become locked in a permanent unsustainable crisis mode. Companies can become addicted to it, continuously burning out their best workers and alienating those who may need upskilling. A high turnover of staff is a common indicator that this culture has taken root.
Possible Solutions: Joint Responsibility
Scrum and the thinking around it has provided us with some pretty good solutions to this issue. In Scrum (and other agile methods), the team takes responsibility for delivery–they succeed together and fail together. If the whole team is responsible for delivery, the team begins to help each other out, develop each other and are more likely to succeed. Individual incentives become aligned with that of the overall project and success becomes more likely.