Irresponsible Caution
Incentives that reduce value, waste time, & weaponize risk
Motivating Mediocrity
We are each subject to observations, commentary, and actions by others that influence our decisions and behavior. We may perceive this as admiration and encouragement — giving us credit, but alternately could feel that attention as scrutiny and judgment — subjecting us to blame.
Unfortunately, Oxford University’s Christopher Hood finds blame may carry up to 4x the cultural weight as comparable credit [1], resulting in devoting greater effort to avoiding blame than to earning credit. We can see this social amplification of blame, termed “negativity bias”, when successes become taken for granted while failures are reliably spotlighted.
Though negativity bias may be observed most prominently in the selection and emphasis of stories carried by news media, such bias has become evident in adversarial legalism [2] (as seen in frequently aired ads by law firms) and the explicit tactics of the politics of fear [3] increasingly prominent in tribal rhetoric of our political parties.
It is rational in light of such asymmetric risk of punishment vs. celebration for individuals and organizations to elect to employ strategies for blame avoidance [4]. Hood describes the diminished personal and shared potential resulting from those behaviors “mediocrity bias”.
Sanctimonious & Self-Centered
Within this cultural focus, ambitious contenders for success not only maneuver to dodge accountability, but can also initiate, magnify, and redirect assignment of fault against rivals or in pursuit of financial or political gain. The title of Hood’s book “The Blame Game” [1] refers to the activities and tactics involved in the attribution (and avoidance) of culpability for failure and loss, particularly when these are perceived as avoidable.
The most concerning undesirable characteristics precipitating from successful players of The Blame Game include (offensively) being sanctimonious: vindictive, ruthless, impatient, and intensifying severity (and defensively) self-centered: risk averse, spare in devoting support time, money, resources, or support, while opportunistic with credit and perhaps even patently hypocritical.
Fallibility Intolerance
To appreciate the plentifulness of opportunities to make errors, we need look no further than the numerous folksy sayings and revered proverbs attempting to offer reminders of human shortcomings. Of course, when people engage the real world, every one of us must shoulder a multitude of pragmatic limitations:
- from VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity)
- to prioritization of finite resources (money, people, materials, but also including, prominently: time — time to sense, to understand, to learn, to act, etc.)
- to human fallibility (distraction from focus, fatigue, forgetfulness, fear, anxiety, subjectivity, inconsistency, etc.)
which taken together are sufficiently abundant to expose decisions made and actions taken to scrutiny and judgment in hind-sight. (Related articles address how technologies may compensate for some of this, see):
Ill-conceived Impacts
Unfortunately, the necessary caution imposed by the rules of the Blame Game [1] lead to consequential and undesirable costs and impediments not only in politics, but also in the conduct of business or the practices of law and medicine. While some of the descriptions that follow apply broadly, the intent is to illustrate rather than catalog exhaustively.
Engineering: Product Design & Manufacturing
An essential element of engineering is optimization, and there is little question the creation and use of metrics could easily be labeled obsessive. Well-established measurements and formulae guide improvements in both engineered products and the organizations that design and make them. These are employed to drive efficiency (such as variable cost productivity, cycle time, and margin) and performance (relating to forms of speed, agility, capacity, and capability).
Examples of undesirable impacts resulting from mediocrity bias:
Conservatism/CYA: (risk avoidance, particularly in regulated and safety-critical contexts) over-engineering to compensate for uncertainty through the introduction of “design margin” to assure robustness & reliability despite unknowns. This adds waste and may reduce performance [5].
- Deliberation: (increased use of time and reduced agility) stemming from “analysis paralysis” confronted with uncertainty or undecidability, and insufficient resources (including time) to reach desired certainty.
- Compliance: guidelines are more likely to be ever-increasing over time since incentives to sign off on relaxation or reduction of policies would bear significantly higher risks and penalties.
- Squandered Advantage: in assessing intellectual property, hubris may set unrealistic competitive valuation leading to overhead costs to track and guard trade secrets, compared with the value of leveraging superior understanding and ability to execute upon those ideas.
Tyranny of Productivity: (relentless pursuit to drive down costs and/or time) pressures for short-term and/or narrowly-focused solutions that insufficiently deliver long-term, downstream, or organizational impact.
- Solution Brittleness: performs poorly after changes to operational environment, intended use, or other VUCA effects. For example, premature acceptance of the minimally viable solutions of agile.
(See also: Steven Koh’s Myth of Agile — faster, cheaper, better). - Workforce Brittleness: agile practices, properly implemented, boost talent utilization, committing resources to sprints with intense focus, and elimination of distractions. But this forfeits availability of reserves (slack) to respond to other emergent issues and opportunities.
- Reinvention: “give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish”, focused execution insufficiently invests in broadening needed capabilities of people, processes, tools and knowledge (such as documentation) to repeat, adapt, iterate, or scale up a successful specific solution.
- Deferred Debt: incentivizing these makeshift or specific solutions can accumulate technical debt, with non-linear increase in complexity to resolve — possibly beyond the capabilities of the originators. Additionally, automated solutions such as machine learning accrue a variation on this termed intellectual debt when their data-derived models lack transparency and explainability..
- Tyranny of Data: diminished motivation to initiate innovation when confronted with substantial data and sophisticated correlation (which, being derived from legacy mindsets, assumptions, biases, and operational conditions will be limited to the world view contained within the reference training data). This reverence for “Big Data” is presently accelerating with the persistent and increasingly compelling success of machine learning techniques (see again: intellectual debt).
Business & Accounting
Broadening these impacts beyond engineering to include administrative and corporate governance functions highlights, in particular, issues that arise between timeframes and organizational boundaries.
Execution Discontinuity: reduced strategic coherence when lengthy timespans separate events such as annualized cycles for budgeting and resource assignment or from proposal-to-award as essential personnel involved in decision-making may be subject to turnover, reassignment, or shift in focus. Even if consistent, distraction may cloud recollection of intent, contingency plans, etc. see also:
Obligations of Incumbency: commitments to legacy activities hinder the ability to devote people, time, & attention to new opportunities (see the Innovator’s Dilemma and “geriatric” product sustainment hindering “pediatric” innovation characterized in “There is No Spoon [6]”).
Dysfunctional Incentives: such as those stimulating intra-company competition, where an outcome (/reward) strongly (/exclusively) benefits the organizational silo (/executive) bearing the costs. For example, reducing implementation of digital thread from enterprise impact to be confined within sub-organization boundaries (e.g., loss of a manufacturing benefit due to the design team bearing the costs but spare recognition, even taken for granted).
See also: On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B [7].
- Conflict of Interests: (between agents and principals) for example, executive leaders conducting business with aspirations to create and sustain durable long-term competitiveness, but coerced to conflicting actions by investors primarily focused on quarterly dividends
(see The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership [8]).
Practice of Medicine
Alongside modern advances in science and technology, public expectations have become less and less accepting of morbidity and mortality. Yet despite extensive use of scientific language, much of the practice of medicine remains an art, confronting vast unpredictability and VUCA in patients, conditions, and the encompassing socio-economic and legal frameworks.
Treatment Discontinuity: reduced strategic coherence as health events occurring over lengthy timespans and/or differing physicians and/or under different insurance policies. For example, in cancer therapies, tests taken and decisions made over years or even generations as well as co-morbidity treatments by other specialists.
Conservatism/CYA: prominently in the practice of “Defensive Medicine” where incentives to genuinely act on behalf of the wellbeing of the patient are subordinate to penalties and risks such as: malpractice litigation, profit motive for practice employer, and insurance reimbursement requirements. Consequently, scale and constraints for modern practice of clinical medicine have resulted in behaviors eroding patient-physician trust; see also Dr. ADAM TABRIZ:
- Assurance: Waste of time & money (and delay of treatment) due to redundant tests, consultations, referrals, visits, etc. taken to mitigate legal risk and/or guarantee of reimbursement (even employer guidance for aggressive cost coding).
- Avoidance: Denial of care in screening patients based on insurance policy, physiological characteristics (age, weight, prior conditions) as potential risks for treatment success impacting professional metrics, likelihood of legal exposure, and combinations of all three.
Curative Emphasis: engagements marginalize patient sense of agency to make informed choices among pragmatically-framed health options that consider both wellness (quality of life, burden on time and finances) and rehabilitative merit among interventions.
Justice & Legal
Following similar themes from above, the risk of blame for subjectivity in consequential decision-making may be particularly acute in the procedural systems formally designed to judiciously assign culpability, award damages for loss, and dispense punishment for harm. Consider here a range of matters from copyright infringement and property rights to immigration and child custody to sentencing and parole to regulated industries.
Conservatism/CYA: arising from controversial bias and sometimes criminal corruption, attempts to moderate discretionary flexibility toward uniformity have sometimes explicitly codified formulaic bounds such as in mandatory sentencing, family law, or negligence. However, pursuit of uniformly applying the law due to perceived injustice in affording flexibility can result in concerning unintended consequences [9].
Authority Discontinuity: when not adjudicated by formula, the discretion afforded judges, juries, parole boards, and bureaucrats may lead to case variation in sequential reviews or following referrals or appeals. Therefore, it is necessary to carefully record terms and conditions across intermittent reviews to improve coherent dialogue among authorities, litigants, and other participants such as petitioners, parolees, or attorneys.
Dysfunctional Incentives: when intended outcomes of services conflict with metrics for success or profit interests, such as rehabilitation success in privatized prisons that are paid based on their number of inmates.
See also: On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B [7].
Politics & Government
By its very nature, politics embrace all these behaviors and are the central focus of The Blame Game [1] and several of the other references cited. The risks of scrutiny and weaponized blame have intensified in the present state of round-the-clock news media, uncompromising tribalism dividing political parties, and willingness to break with historical norms in respecting the dignity of public office.
We can easily link the human fallibilities noted earlier in diminished effectiveness in politics and government to sincerely serve the interests of represented constituents. Communication from public officials has attuned to the selective listening and distracted memory of the public, amplified and filtered through negativity bias in news media.
Consequently, political discourse embraces evasiveness, crafting plausible deniability in statements “on the record” while maneuvering opportunistically to diffuse and deflect their own accountability unless momentarily beneficial. On the other hand, the same officials levy accusations upon rivals with enthusiasm and presumed certainty, employing reckless use of logical fallacies in partisan rhetoric and undermining authoritative expertise.
Upon this stage, the media showcases public officials more often engaging in ideological performance art than substantive deliberation relating to their obligations to represent crucial interests of their constituents. The resulting gridlock foments tolerance for mediocrity and erodes trust in public institutions.
The lack of clarity and transparency linking effectiveness in serving the needs of those they represent affords politicians leeway to instead act in their re-election self-interest and on behalf of (potentially conflicting) donor interests. A more thorough survey of the dysfunctional elements, misaligned incentives, and obstacles to remedy can be found in The Politics Industry [10], along with proposed solutions.
Alternative Possibilities
This was written to frame key issues across important contexts with some solutions in mind. If today’s institutions and incentives are driving leadership behaviors that are Selfish (egocentric, defensive, hypocritical) and Sanctimonious (vindictive, ruthless, uncompromising), can we design systems or tools to escape the traps of negativity bias and blame avoidance? Can we motivate and nurture better natures in our leaders, such as being Insightful (inquisitive, observant, adaptable, innovative), Shrewd (efficient, decisive, resilient, prudent), and Trustworthy (accountable, consistent, sincere, conscientious)?
These are discussed in the previously-cited Provenance for Decision-Making, which seeks to improve contextualization, built upon Machine-augmented Mindfulness toward the vision of The Awakened Enterprise.
In addition to browsing the references below, another important angle examining these issues is addressed by David Brin in The Transparent Society, Perseus Press, 1998.
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References
- Hood, Christopher. The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy, and Self-Preservation in Government. Princeton University Press, 2011.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400836819.3 - Kagen, Robert A., Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law. Harvard University Press, 2001. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjz83k7
- Furedi, Frank. Politics of Fear. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005. (pp. 123–141). http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474212526.ch-007
- Weaver, R. Kent. “The Politics of Blame Avoidance.” Journal of Public Policy 6, no. 4 (1986): 371–398. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0143814X00004219
- Eckert, Claudia. Isaksson, Ola., & Earl, Chris. Design margins: A hidden issue in industry. Design Science, 5, E9., 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/dsj.2019.7
- Roper, Will. There is No Spoon: The New Digital Acquisition Reality, US Space Force, Department of the Air Force, Secretary of the Air Force.
- Kerr, Steven. “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B.” The Academy of Management Executive (1993–2005) 9, no. 1 , 1995.
https://doi.org/10.5465/ame.1995.9503133466
(Originally) Academy of Management Journal, 18. 769–793, 1975. - Bower, Joseph L., Paine, Lynn S. “The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership.” Harvard Business Review Magazine, May-June 2017
- Howard, Philip K. The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America. Random House, 1995 (re-released 2010)
- Gehl, Katherine M., Porter, Michael E., The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy, Harvard Business Review Press, 2020 (see: https://gehlporter.com/)
