Source: Coyote Blog
by Warren Meyer
“Here is Coyote’s first law of incentives: There are always incentives. If they are not embodied in written performance metrics, then there are unwritten ones that rule behaviors. And these unwritten incentives are generally a) very powerful and b) almost never aligned with the greater organization’s goals. … To some extent the agencies I worked with were better than most because public lands agencies (eg NPS, state parks) attracted people with a sense of mission which could motivate people even when the organization did not. But in general, government employees operate in a vacuum without any positive metrics — they can’t prove themselves by meeting or exceeding this or that goal because the goals have not been assigned and are not measured. So the default metric becomes this: to avoid screwing up.” (03/03/25)