Every system is teaching people something. We talk about what.
Conversations on incentive design, behavioral economics, and the payoffs hiding underneath strategy. New episodes as they drop.
Episode Four — AI Agents Inherit Your Incentives
AI agents inherit whatever objective a company encodes and pursue it without the informal judgment employees use to soften a badly specified goal. Misaligned agent behavior is usually a specification problem that already existed and only became visible when something finally followed the rules literally.
Every organization runs on a quiet subsidy: people ignore the parts of their objectives that would cause obvious harm. Deploy an agent against the same objective and the subsidy disappears — which makes agent deployment the most honest incentive audit most companies have ever run.
- —An agent is your objective function with human discretion removed.
- —If the agent behaves badly inside its rules, the rules were already wrong and people were silently correcting them for free.
- —Specify the counter-metric and the hard prohibitions before deployment, not after the first incident.
- —Unfunded human oversight becomes a rubber stamp within about a month.
Episode Three — The Four Layers of Every Incentive System
Economic, status, safety, and temporal. Every organization runs all four at once, and the dysfunction leaders complain about almost always lives in the disagreement between them rather than inside any single layer.
Show notes and transcriptEpisode Two — Why Good People Game Good Metrics
Goodhart's Law in practice: how a metric that was honest for years turns dishonest the moment it carries a bonus, three field cases where the dashboard improved while the business got worse, and the paired-metric fix that costs nothing to implement.
Show notes and transcriptEpisode One — Why Incentives Beat Strategy
The opening conversation of The Incentives Lab Podcast: why every strategy deck loses to the incentive system underneath it, how perverse incentives quietly form inside good organizations, and what leaders can redesign this quarter.
Show notes and transcript