# Incentivizing Chaos By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-03-06 A classic organizational strategy is to measure and incentivize behaviors you want to see. Want higher quality products? Measure it, report it, and give out bonuses when reaching the target. This tactic has migrated far and wide. However, it has limits if anyone cared to give it any thought. For example, it's not uncommon for organizations to use this tactic to incentive personality traits. The question is whether an organization benefits more from everyone being the same or everyone being different. Let's say that you want everyone in your organization to be obsessed with and blindly enthusiastic about excellent customer service. This means things like the customer is always right, endless smiling, bending over backward, and only focusing on this one thing. Is it good if everyone is smiling and only caring about customer service? Aren't other things also important? Sometimes it is good to have someone who thinks about things differently - it's called diversity. Yet, many organizational values and performance review metrics incentivize anti-diversity in thought and behavior. Certainly, there are some more universal values such as respect and honesty that make sense to incentivize, but what about things as simple as introversion vs. extroversion? You may think that there is no way organizations are incentivizing one of these traits over the other, but they most certainly are. What traits are incentivized when an organization advocates bias to action, collective decision-making in meetings, and having meals with colleagues? These are all skewed toward extroversion. This post is not anti-extroverts, but pro-diversity of all types. Complex adaptive systems thrive with the right mix of order and chaos. Modern organizations likely continue to fail at ridiculously high rates because they spend too much time on order and not enough on chaos. #### Related Items [[Complex Systems]] [[Learning]] [[Metrics]] [[Organizational Analytics]] [[Value]] [[Cognitive Biases]]