Incentivising and Tracking Output

 

Every Tuesday morning the local council has guys come out and sweep up the streets, collect all the leaves and so forth. 

And they have an interesting system.

They’ll do a couple of streets in one go where they pull together all the leaves in bundles. I’m sure they do that because they figured it’s an optimal system.

But where we live is like a wind tunnel.

Can you guess what happens to those bundles?

By the time they get to the originally assembled batches, the leaves are everywhere again. And I see this happen every Tuesday morning time and again.

Because these council workers are not on the hook for the quality or the number of leaves collected, they just keep doing the same thing.

Every. 

Single. 

Tuesday. 

And, for a guy like me, it’s just brutal to watch it happen lol. 

Why would they need to adapt to do a better job, right?

There’s no feedback loop to assess the quality of the finished job. And there’s no incentive for the team or management to ask if there’s a better way when it’s windy.

So… the same thing keeps happening.

THE LESSON

Think about what you incentivise for… how you track output and the quality of your team’s output.

As famed Venture Capitalist, Marc Andreessen, once said:

“Be careful what you incentivise for because for every incentive there is the downside of that incentive that you need to monitor for.”