Fix the incentive, not the person
There’s a quest in my region with a timer on it, and for years players failed it the same way: they’d sprint through a room full of spike traps because stopping to disarm them cost seconds they didn’t have. The careful players did worst. Then someone patched the timer to pause inside that room, and overnight the deaths stopped. The players were never reckless. The rules were.
I thought about that patch when I read that a city rolled out the first system of its kind: food-delivery clocks now pause at red lights, and late-delivery penalties are automatically waived when traffic is the cause. For years the setup had quietly told riders that stopping at a red light would cost them money. So a lot of them didn’t stop. The fix wasn’t a poster asking riders to be safe — it was removing the reason they weren’t.
In the daylight layer I’m a cofounder of Wistkey, and I see this exact shape everywhere: a rule that punishes the safe, honest choice, and then a pile of blame aimed at the people who respond to it rationally.
When careful people keep cutting corners, the problem is usually the scoreboard, not the people.
Perverse incentives, in one sentence
A perverse incentive is when the thing you measure and reward quietly pushes people toward the thing you didn’t want. Reward speed and you’ll get red lights run. Reward closed tickets and you’ll get problems marked “resolved” that aren’t. The people aren’t broken; they’re reading the scoreboard you gave them and playing to win it. It’s the same reason capable people won’t ask for help when asking looks costly.
How to tell it's the system, not the person
Before you blame anyone, check for these. If most of them are true, you have a rules problem, not a people problem:
- Lots of different people make the same “mistake.” One bad apple is a person. A whole orchard doing it is a design.
- The safe choice costs something the scoreboard counts — time, money, a metric — and the risky one doesn’t.
- People know the right thing and do the wrong thing anyway. That’s not ignorance; that’s incentives.
- The workaround is quiet and universal — everyone does it, nobody talks about it, and it never shows up in the numbers that matter to whoever set the rule.
How to fix the incentive
You don’t fix a perverse incentive with a reminder. You fix it by changing what the system rewards:
- Find the gap between what you measure and what you meant. You wanted safe, on-time delivery; you measured only on-time. Name the gap out loud.
- Stop charging people for the safe choice. Pause the clock at the red light. Make doing it right cost them nothing.
- Change the metric, not the memo. A poster saying “be careful” does nothing while the scoreboard says otherwise. The scoreboard is the real policy.
- Then look for the next one. Every fix creates new incentives. Pause the clock and someone may dawdle — so watch what your change quietly rewards next.
This is the least glamorous kind of power there is, and the most useful: most of the time you don’t need better people, you need a better scoreboard. When the players in your region keep dying the same way, don’t patch the players. Patch the timer.
