Domain 06
Work and Careers
Metrics, promotion, hours and effort are agency and signalling problems dressed as culture problems.
Two mechanisms dominate. First, multitask agency: when part of the job is measurable and part is not, strong incentives on the measurable part pull effort away from the rest — which is why hard-edged metrics so often make the underlying work worse while the dashboard improves. Second, hours and visibility function as costly signals of commitment, and signalling races have no natural ceiling, so the equilibrium ratchets with no gain to anybody. Note also that most 'toxic culture' is a stag hunt: many people would raise the real problem if somebody else went first, and each of them is individually correct not to be that person.
The people the work is actually for — customers, patients, students — who are represented in the room only by a proxy metric. Also whoever will be doing this job in three years, and everyone at home absorbing the cost of the hours.
What to look for
- Which parts of this job can be measured, and which parts actually matter?
- Is the extra hour producing anything, or signalling something?
- Would people raise the problem if one person went first? Then it is not apathy.
- Who bears the cost of the arrangement and is not in the meeting about it?
The shapes that run this field
Principal and Agent
A delegated task with unobservable effort and imperfectly aligned interests.
Shape 12Costly Signalling
A costly, observable action that reveals private information because faking it would not pay.
Shape 01The Prisoner's Dilemma
Mutual cooperation beats mutual defection, but defecting is the better move whatever the other side does.
Shape 03The Stag Hunt
Mutual cooperation is the best outcome for everyone, but it is risky — and the safe option is available unilaterally.
Shape 16Escalation
A sequence in which each response justifies the next, and no step is individually unreasonable.
In practice
Principal and Agent
A call centre hitting handling-time targets while resolution quietly collapses.
The Prisoner's Dilemma
Everyone staying late because leaving first is a statement, and the work does not need it.
The Stag Hunt
A team where everybody privately knows the project is failing and nobody will be first to say it.