“Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.” -W. Edwards Deming
I think about this quote whenever I hear or read about system changes. The system could be the government, a private company, personal relationships, etc.
One of the most common changes is using incentives.
Free stuff is often used as an incentive. At college sporting events, college students are incentivized to go to games with free food and free gear. So the students wait in line for the free stuff and then leave immediately.
In past decades, students were encouraged to read with the promise of free pizza. Now, there are plenty of people who won’t read without incentives, though some will find the intrinsic motivation to read.
In most sports, teams are not incentivized to do better when they are at the bottom of the standings. They are actually incentivized to do poorly with the higher likelihood of better draft picks. Imagine paying to go to a game where a team is trying to lose…
When I'm thinking about incentives in social media, no party is incentivized to remove engagement metrics from non-real users (well, until the majority of the engagement is obviously spam/fake).
Engagement can be measured in followers, likes, shares, comments, and views.
For content creators, they sell their ads (or supported content) by leveraging the number of engagements.
For marketers, they report the engagement of their collaborations/ads.
For social platforms, they earn revenue by selling or prioritizing paid content.
As you can see, there is an incentive for all parties to grow their engagement numbers. Unfortunately, there are not many ways to determine how much of the engagement is genuine; there is not much incentive for the parties involved to measure genuine engagement either. Engagement is noisy, but focusing on the KPIs will be essential to measure true success.
Systems are built to drive people to specific behaviors (both intended and unintended).
Governments push people towards specific behaviors with taxes (e.g. capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages). Public assistance can often have “cliff effects,” which push people into poverty traps (e.g., stay under a certain income to remain eligible for assistance).
Many systems are designed with a narrow focus; it is essential to consider the broader view as it may have many unintended consequences.
When I see “irrational” behavior from people, I often look at their environment; more often than not, it results from a system. How is the system encouraging/discouraging them to do something?
Note: This post has been a bit all over the place, but I thought it might be worth publishing to trigger some people to reflect on the systems around them.