Great article, thank you for this Margaret! The best incentive I have seen and experienced in my career is giving equity in the company. It gives a partial ownership to the employees, aligns them with the venture's vision (or at least makes them care about the overall growth of the business), and motivates them to give their all.
Excellent. Brilliantly written. Very timely and powerful insight. How to break the cycle is the question- human evolution has programmed us to seek rewards for doing ‘the right thing’. Our susceptibility to seeking rewards has put us at the top of the evolutionary tree. So easy for employers, governments and others to use this important trait to manipulate behaviour- often with little regard for the unintended consequences.
Excellent observation - thank you. I think we can overcome the lure of incentives but an appeal to the value of the effort has to be real, it has to be consistent and it has to part of the ethos of the organization.
In Canada, incentives are the “rule of thumb” for election campaigns & running the country, along with bug lights for issues. What is happening now is exposing that these leaders are responsible for our endemic problems themselves. I suppose, at least in smaller measure, like your Minister of Health.
Thanks Simon. And thanks for the link to your own excellent article on incentives which I enjoyed a lot. It's interesting: we know, have known for decades, the perversity of incentives but somehow appear unable to disentangle ourselves from them. A lack of faith in human nature--or an inability to stand out from the crowd?
Great article, thank you for this Margaret! The best incentive I have seen and experienced in my career is giving equity in the company. It gives a partial ownership to the employees, aligns them with the venture's vision (or at least makes them care about the overall growth of the business), and motivates them to give their all.
Excellent. Brilliantly written. Very timely and powerful insight. How to break the cycle is the question- human evolution has programmed us to seek rewards for doing ‘the right thing’. Our susceptibility to seeking rewards has put us at the top of the evolutionary tree. So easy for employers, governments and others to use this important trait to manipulate behaviour- often with little regard for the unintended consequences.
Excellent observation - thank you. I think we can overcome the lure of incentives but an appeal to the value of the effort has to be real, it has to be consistent and it has to part of the ethos of the organization.
In Canada, incentives are the “rule of thumb” for election campaigns & running the country, along with bug lights for issues. What is happening now is exposing that these leaders are responsible for our endemic problems themselves. I suppose, at least in smaller measure, like your Minister of Health.
Best piece on incentives I've seen in a *very* long while. Thank you. At worst, as in the NHS in the past, incentives + targets can kill. Here's what I wrote a bit ago https://www.simoncaulkin.co.uk/2024/05/29/how-incentives-ate-the-world/
Thanks Simon. And thanks for the link to your own excellent article on incentives which I enjoyed a lot. It's interesting: we know, have known for decades, the perversity of incentives but somehow appear unable to disentangle ourselves from them. A lack of faith in human nature--or an inability to stand out from the crowd?
To the two potential causes you list in this comment, a third may need to be added: greater faith in money than in people.
Seeing people as if they were in the service of the great god Money. Instead of money being in the service of people.
I’ve been fascinated with what you might call ‘psychology of money’ for a couple of years now. That exploration just keeps widening for me.
Thank you for your article! 🙏