Scientific Definition
Greedy improvement loops climb hills that aren't the highest hill.
Plain-English Definition
Greedy improvement loops climb hills that aren't the highest hill.
Feynman Explanation
You can be the best at the wrong thing.
Core Principle
Greedy improvement loops climb hills that aren't the highest hill.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Greedy improvement loops climb hills that aren't the highest hill.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Local-greedy beats global-aware in most orgs.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
You can be the best at the wrong thing.
Examples
- Org units optimizing functional KPIs against system goals.
- Local-greedy beats global-aware in most orgs.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- System-level metrics. Cross-unit accountability.
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- System-level metrics. Cross-unit accountability.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Once-a-year feedback rewards once-a-year behavior.
The more a quantitative indicator drives decisions, the more it distorts the process it measures.
Donors penalize 'overhead'; charities under-invest in capacity.
Donors penalize 'overhead' and starve capacity that produces outcomes.
A reward designed to reduce X produces more X.
Squeezing all slack from a system optimizes throughput but eliminates resilience.
'Equal value' exchanges incentivize subjective appraisal gaming to trade low-utility land for high-value public assets.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Deep specialization improves local output but breaks cross-domain understanding.
When rewards don't match stated values, culture quietly decays toward what is rewarded.
Insulation from risk changes the risks people take.
Systems with weak corrective feedback drift unchecked into failure modes.