On smart people making dumb decisions.
13 April 2026
If you’re observing intelligent people making questionable decisions within your organization, you might want to consider the design of the environment in which they operate.
If you have not explicitly designed the environment, that might be the problem.
Contentious people will strive to do good work. But they may not share your definition of “good”! In an unstructured environment, people will tend to maximize their personal efficiency or minimize cost.
But optimizing for these parameters may suboptimize the performance of the larger organization. (For example, Procurement minimizing shipping costs might result in costly outages in production.)
Accordingly, your job (as a member of the leadership team) is to ensure that every team member evaluates their own performance using a metric that supports optimal global performance. The trick is to make sure this metric is significantly more visible than any “rogue” metrics.
In most cases, this will be a speed-based metric.