How poorly set targets lead to unintended consequences

In 1947, when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered, archaeologists set a finder’s fee for each new parchment. Instead of lots of extra scrolls being found, they were simply torn apart to increase the reward. Similarly, in China in the nineteenth century, an incentive was offered for finding dinosaur bones. Farmers located a few on their land, broke them into pieces and cashed in. Modern incentives are no better: company boards promise bonuses for achieved targets. And what happens? Managers invest more energy in trying to lower the targets than in growing the business.

Targets do not merely measure behaviour. They breed it.

Pay by fragment and scrolls become confetti. Reward discovered bone pieces and priceless specimens become a farmer’s loyalty scheme. The people involved understood the instruction with magnificent, destructive precision.

Modern versions arrive as dashboards. A support team rewarded for short calls ends conversations before problems end. Salespeople paid for meetings create calendars full of decorative prospects. Developers judged by lines of code learn that deleting complexity is career sabotage.

Then management says the culture needs fixing. No: the scoreboard is coaching the team. Before attaching money, status or fear to a metric, invite the cleverest cynic in the room to game it. How could the number improve while the actual outcome gets worse? What valuable behaviour might become invisible? Which awkward cases will be dumped elsewhere?

Pair speed with resolution. Pair meetings with qualified pipeline. Pair output with defects, maintenance and customer consequence. Keep human judgement where the work refuses to become a clean number. Metrics compress the work; they never contain all of it. Once rewarded, they stop sitting quietly on the dashboard and start redesigning reality. Choose a target carefully because its incentives will keep echoing long after the launch presentation ends.