When people behave “irrationally,” assume you do not yet understand the incentive structure.

That does not mean every behavior is good. It means behavior is usually adaptive inside some local game. If you try to argue people out of behavior without understanding the game, you will sound righteous and change little.

Live players read incentives before they prescribe behavior.

Incentives are broader than compensation

Money matters, but incentives include attention, status, safety, promotion paths, blame avoidance, executive proximity, identity, workload, and the right to be left alone.

A manager may hoard headcount because headcount signals importance. A team may hide risk because bad news is punished. A salesperson may sell bad-fit deals because bookings count and retention is someone else’s problem. A product team may overbuild enterprise features because the loudest customers are the ones executives hear.

Nobody needs to be a villain for the system to produce bad behavior.

The operating move

When behavior does not match stated priorities, ask:

  • What is rewarded?
  • What is punished?
  • What is ignored?
  • What creates status?
  • What creates safety?
  • Who pays the cost of this behavior?
  • Who receives the benefit?

Then compare the answers to the official goal. The gap is the real operating system.

Do not moralize first

Moral language is sometimes necessary. But as a first move, it often reduces your ability to see.

“Sales keeps dumping garbage into onboarding” may be true emotionally. Operationally, the sharper statement is: “Sales receives credit at signature, onboarding receives the cost after signature, and there is no shared quality gate with authority to reject bad-fit customers.”

The second statement can be fixed.

Changing incentives without changing everything

You rarely control the whole incentive system. That is fine. Live players look for leverage points:

  • add a quality metric to the growth metric;
  • move decision rights closer to the cost;
  • make hidden rework visible;
  • require a named owner for cross-functional consequences;
  • change what gets reviewed by senior people;
  • celebrate the behavior you want repeated;
  • remove prestige from the behavior causing damage.

Small incentive changes can alter the local game.

If the broader company will not change, narrow the arena. Change the incentive around one handoff, one review, one approval, one quality bar, one meeting where senior attention lands. Live players respect scope. They do not pretend local control is global control, but they also do not use global dysfunction as an excuse for passivity.

If you want to be a live player, stop being surprised that people respond to the system around them. Read the game, then change the game.