Incentives aren't broken. They're working exactly as designed. That's the problem. You want people to do more of something. You attach a reward to it. People do more of it. Everyone wins. Except that's not what happens. The Proxy Trap You want to improve customer satisfaction. But satisfaction is hard to measure in real time. So you pick something easier. Call handling time. Shorter calls mean more customers served, which means happier customers. Right? So you incentivise sho

I've seen months of effort poured into dashboards that nobody uses. Beautiful charts. Real time data. Colour coded everything. RAG statuses that update automatically. Drill downs into drill downs. The team glances at them in meetings, nods politely, and goes back to their spreadsheets. The problem is rarely the dashboard. It's what's being measured. The Activity Trap Most operational dashboards measure activity: Call volumes Average handling time Tasks completed Queue lengths