Scientific Definition
Accumulated workarounds for misaligned incentives that compound like technical debt.
Plain-English Definition
Accumulated workarounds for misaligned incentives that compound like technical debt.
Feynman Explanation
Every workaround is a tax your future org will pay.
Core Principle
Accumulated workarounds for misaligned incentives that compound like technical debt.
Mechanisms
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Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
Every workaround is a tax your future org will pay.
Examples
- Bonus carve-outs and SPIFs that 'just for this quarter' became permanent.
- Incentive debt explains why simple strategy changes feel impossible.
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Famous Experiments
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Design Principles
- Refactor incentive systems on a schedule, not on a crisis.
Measurement Approaches
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Evidence
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The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Refactor incentive systems on a schedule, not on a crisis.
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Interactive Mini Network
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Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Inability to see the incentives shaping one's own behavior.
Reward systems slowly diverge from the outcomes they were meant to drive.
Without active design, incentives decay toward gameable proxies.
Behavior bends toward whatever the system actually rewards.
Treating the measure as the goal it was meant to approximate.
Clear ownership of outcomes, not just tasks.
Asymmetric information attracts the worst counterparties.
We defer to perceived expertise, rank, or uniform.
Vastness that exceeds existing schemas dissolves the self briefly.
Negative feedback returns a system toward a target.
Membership in a group is a baseline human need.
Individually rational choices that produce a collectively bad outcome.