How incentives affect work

A support team closes many tickets and is praised for speed. Customers keep returning with the same difficulty. The report improved while part of the problem remained.

Several explanations are possible. Tickets may be complex, resources insufficient or answers unable to resolve what customers need. If the team is assessed mainly by the number of closed tickets, investigate how that rule affects its work too.

Incentives are conditions that make some actions more advantageous. They include formal rewards and less explicit consequences: who receives recognition, who has to explain delays and who absorbs the cost of a promise.

Understand which result the rule favors

Consider fictional salespeople recognized for their number of contracts, with no distinction between standard offers and requests requiring customization. Special requests may look attractive during sales and demand substantial work afterward.

Examine the comparison the rule creates. If every signed contract counts equally, subsequent effort becomes less visible to those choosing which opportunities to pursue.

That does not imply bad faith. Professional responsibility, experience and relationships with colleagues also affect decisions. The rule creates a condition to examine alongside the others.

Ask what someone must do to be considered successful in that area. Then follow what happens to the work they produce.

Locate benefits and costs

A decision can generate revenue for one area and maintenance for another. Who participates before a commitment is accepted? Who estimates effort? Who receives the request when difficulties arise?

Following that path helps identify costs missing from the report. Support might have to explain a customization to each new customer. Product teams might maintain different versions needing additional tests.

Those costs do not automatically make the sale bad. A specialized offer might justify a different price and its own operation. Include that possibility rather than treating every exception as a failure.

When nobody assesses the complete offer, sales revenue may conceal the maintenance work it creates.

Examine available information

A team can make unsuitable choices because information arrives too late. If maintenance effort appears months later, the person who negotiated the contract may never see the consequence.

Regular feedback between areas can help. The salesperson needs to know whether delivery was feasible on the agreed terms. The people carrying out the work need to understand the needs behind the promise.

In Leverage Points, Donella Meadows discusses rules and information flows as parts of the structure influencing system behavior. That perspective suggests examining how work is organized alongside requests for individual changes. Applying it to a particular team requires observing its conditions.

Be careful when replacing one metric with another

If complex contracts cause problems, rewarding only simple ones could produce another effect: abandoning customers whose needs the company could serve well. Changing the rule requires stating the objective and observing the behavior it favors.

A more complete measure may also be difficult to use. Assigning every future consequence to one person is not always possible or fair. Some depend on execution, external changes and later decisions.

Begin by making the cost visible in assessments without immediately turning everything into a reward formula. Bringing sales and operations together before accepting exceptions already changes available information.

Compare cases that escape the rule

Look for situations where the team acted carefully despite a poorly matched reward. What supported that choice? A close relationship with support, a limit on promises or leadership that recognized the care?

Also examine decisions that seemed sound and created unexpected costs. They may reveal missing knowledge rather than a motivation problem.

Those differences help you choose an intervention. Training addresses a different need from changing approval criteria or redistributing responsibility.

Monitor the change's effects

Assess a new rule by what happens afterward. The fictional company could require a delivery estimate before promising customizations. Track negotiation time, later work and rejected requests.

The procedure might reduce unfeasible commitments while slowing simple sales. You may then need to define when the extra assessment is required. Observed effects guide the adjustment.

Choose one team target and follow a result to the area receiving it. Describe what improved, who had additional work and which information arrived late. You can then discuss the rule through its consequences without reducing the conversation to accusations about intent.