How to Fix One Broken Incentive in Two Weeks
The full-transformation instinct is why nothing changes. Pick one payoff, fix it, prove it.
A two-week incentive sprint isolates a single broken payoff, traces who benefits from it, redesigns the reward and its guardrail, and ships the change with a measurable before-and-after — instead of launching a multi-quarter transformation.
Transformation programs fail for an incentive reason: nobody's payoff depends on finishing them. Two-week sprints work because the clock is short enough that the outcome lands on someone's actual quarter.
Days 1–3: find the payoff, not the opinion
Interview for mechanism, not sentiment. Ask what happens to a person who does the right thing, in specific, named, observable terms. Collect the promotion history, the last three exceptions granted, and the metric that ends a career here.
Days 4–7: map who is winning
Every broken incentive has a beneficiary, and it is rarely a villain. It is usually a team whose legitimate objective is being served by the distortion. If you redesign without addressing them, the old system reasserts itself within a quarter.
No incentive survives without a constituency. Find it before you legislate.
Days 8–12: redesign and pressure-test
Write the new payoff, the guardrail that catches gaming, the owner, and the review cadence on one page. Then hand it to three people who would benefit from beating it and ask them how they would.
Days 13–14: ship with a scoreboard
Publish the before number, the target, the guardrail, and the date of the first review. An incentive change without a public scoreboard is an announcement, and announcements have no half-life.
Frequently asked
- What kind of problems fit a two-week sprint?
- Single-metric distortions, misfiring commission structures, escalation failures, cross-team handoff breakdowns, and any behavior leadership has already tried to fix with communication.
- What if the problem is bigger than one incentive?
- It usually is. Fixing one visible payoff builds the credibility and the evidence base needed for the larger redesign.
Most performance problems are payoff problems.
The Incentives Lab reconstructs what your organization actually rewards from evidence people cannot manage — promotions, calendars, budget shifts, attrition, and what happens after a bad quarter. Start with the free diagnostic, or talk to us about an audit.
New essay every Wednesday. Subscribe via RSS.
Aaron Bare
Aaron Bare is a strategist, Wall Street Journal-bestselling author, and the founder of The Incentives Lab. He writes and advises on incentive design inside organizations — why culture is the residue of what a company rewards, how KPIs quietly go perverse, and how AI systems inherit the incentives their designers set.
More from Aaron BareGo deeper
More essays
Anatomy of a Two-Week Incentive Sprint
Ten working days from a behavior nobody can explain to a structural change with a counter-metric attached.
AI Agents Inherit Your Incentives
An agent optimizes the objective you wrote down — which is usually the one your people were quietly ignoring for good reason.
Goodhart's Law in the Real World
When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Three field cases and the paired-metric fix.