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In our organization we said it doesn’t matter, a subordinate organization, how many targets you hit or how many people you capture, how successful your little team is. It only matters if we win the big fight. So I’m not interested in your batting average, I’m interested in the team’s score. But that’s a change.
Transparency
There’s a problem, first of a team going rogue and a part of the organization and goes off in a direction, either for bad intentions or just because they don’t understand. What we found was transparency solves the great part of that. Things like that go bad typically when someone thinks they’re doing the right thing and they are literally off track. If they think they’re doing the wrong thing, either way, transparency makes that known very, very rapidly. If they are with bad intentions, you know; if they just misunderstand, the transparency helps correct that. The other problem is individuals who just aren’t part of the solution. There are sometimes managers or middle managers who don’t believe in it or aren’t energetic enough in moving information.
What we found in this shared consciousness environment is they become apparent very, very quickly. Because as people at the lower levels get increasing amounts of information, they know whether their immediate supervisor is passing information well and moving in accordance with the overall intent. In the traditional hierarchy, you sort of knew what your boss told you. And if the boss told you this, it could take a long time to figure out that you’re getting corrupted information or incomplete information. In this environment what we found is that becomes obvious very, very rapidly.
Incentives
In any organization you run into why people do something or not do something. And we get to the classic prisoner’s dilemma. And in the prisoner’s dilemma what happens is two prisoners are taken and they’re given this choice. They say, “You can cooperate with the police, and if you do, and if we convict your buddy, you get a one-year sentence. If you don’t cooperate, you get a two-year sentence.” What you find is the best thing that can happen for them is they rat out their buddy and their buddy doesn’t rat out of them. Now, at the end of the day, they’re a rat but they get the best outcome for themselves. But the best shared outcome is if neither cooperates, and they keep the faith with each other, they maintain the trust with each other.
If you think about in a business or any organization, we’re all a little bit scared. We would like to do well, but we particularly don’t want to be the chump. We don’t want to be burned. We don’t want to be the person waiting at the corner and we’re the joke when nobody shows to pick us up. People have a tendency to be very cautious. If we incentivize people for joint outcomes, for shared outcomes, I think you end up with the best thing. If you can communicate and people say listen, the incentives here go for a combined outcome, not for individual success. And many organizations today incentivize people because they’re trying to get individual effort to be increased, individual aggressiveness, individual sales, you name it. And at the end of the day, what that actually can do, it can eat away at the success of the entire organization.