The Incentive Engine

Curriculum field sheet — When a proxy becomes the target

Independent Sahilverse educational material. Fictional cases; no compulsory personal disclosure.

Opening provocation

A fictional service team doubles its number of closed tickets. Customer problems persist. Did productivity rise? Before taking sides, distinguish what was measured—closures—from what was hoped for—problems solved. Let some participants defend speed as important under scarcity.

The mechanism

Players allocate 100 attention tokens among speed, coaching and careful resolution; a demand shock can be activated. The engine uses deliberately simple arithmetic. Its equations are visible beside the outputs. The numbers are invented, not calibrated to a real workplace. The crucial mechanism is coupling: emphasising one dimension of work can move multiple outcomes.

A serious disagreement

Quantification can help expose waste, manage scarce resources and hold leaders accountable. The alternative to metrics is not always wisdom; it may be arbitrary discretion. The problem begins when a proxy becomes the complete objective and institutions stop checking whether the target still connects to a real human need.

The second-order question

What happens when workers know only ticket closure is rewarded? They may change how they classify problems, close cases prematurely or avoid difficult requests. They may also become genuinely more efficient. What independent outcome measure would distinguish those two situations?

Transfer exercise

Draw an incentive map for a fictional school, local shop, clinic or software team. List one visible KPI, one hoped-for human outcome, one possible way to game the KPI and one countermeasure that does not create excessive bureaucracy.

Evidence boundaries

The equation outputs are pure thought-experiment values, not forecasts of labour behaviour or organisational performance. No psychological construct is inferred from the tokens. The room should be discussed as a model of trade-offs, not evidence for any particular management policy.

Debrief questions

• Which outcomes were deliberately made visible?
• What would the dashboard hide?
• Did the demand shock change your priorities?
• What evidence could make the toy equations more credible?

Learning cycle

Predict → interact → describe the result → state a limitation → revise or retain → transfer to another context. Do not assign a grade for agreement with the lesson.