"What's in it for me ?" Otherwise than incentivizing

An interesting transformation

There is an evil I have seen under the open space lights and it is that judgment is subservient to interest…

“What’s in it for me ?” : this childish sounding question could be the maxim of each and every bee in the famous Mandeville’s fable, these individuals who ply their trade for the greatest public good as long as they keep minding their own business, only heeding norms and values to better leverage them. In the wake of the immense success this vision has met in economic thought, it was inescapable that management took inspiration from it to better serve their principals.

However, their playfield being limited to the corporation, the executives contribution to the emergence of ‘the order engendered by the adjustment of multiple individual economies’ called for by the no less famous Friedrich Hayek (laureate of the prestigious Bank of Sweden Price in Economic Sciences, in memory of  Alfred Nobel), has essentially consisted in enacting more internal rules in order to compensate for the bias of planism, this from within the belly of the enterprise. The reason behind this apparent paradox, abundantly elaborated by the tenants of the agency theory, is precisely employment - that is the generalization of the salaried employee status and the relative protection it extends against the risks to which the stakeholders are, for their part, immediately exposed (while still not getting all the crucial information available to their authorized representatives on the ground).

According to this program, large, heavily planned and regulated organizations have been complexifying themselves even further in a zealous attempt to emulate the pursuit of individual interests. This luxurious, quasi-demiurgic creation can be seen as the carving out of a quarry for additional achievement into the bulk of the dull salary mass only to usher in a lonely crowd of craving individuals motioned by bespoke, monetized drives : the self interested employees. That is, attempting to persuade a collectivity that they are back into the happy hive of the fable - with a hunger. 

As more and more rules are thus being rationally - still arbitrarily - decided at the top and implemented in a military-like manner, the question is : are these rules actually balancing the bias induced by artificial social protections or do they mean stacking up even more bureaucracy laced with intricate distorsions ? Does this complex managerial procedure boil down to planning or to unplanning ? In which direction is this intense, designful production of rules taking us on Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, ?

Into the interests matrix 

Modeling employees behavior with incentives has become such a common practice that one barely questions it. Sales services, in particular, are dedicating unnumerable resources to the design and to the transmission of sophisticated compensation policies aligned on a highly complex set of changing, interrelated objectives (presenting a quantified incentive plan before employees can take hours, not to speak of the infinite discussions this entails). 

If we were to look for the individual devoid of any incentive plan, he or she would only appear as a negative, theoretical entity serving as a reference in the calibration of the models: an inert and submissive worker, only set in motion by heteronomous, perfectly controlled, fully predictable processes - that is typically the one in charge of the uninteresting task, having few valuable interactions with the other beings, a non-person who barely trades or wages war as part of this inter-esse realm which, in Emmanuel Levinas’ view, is the essence itself (“Esse est interesse, the philosopher says, but of course there is little hope that the dearth of inter-esse stuff hints our fictitious, ground zero worker of the transcendence at stake). 

Anyway, companies do not conceive anymore that work can be delivered without any inner motivation. This is why nobody in the organization goes without a minimal part of incentive, be it only in relation with global performance indicators. The most interesting employees will be the most incentivized under the express condition that they take ownership of their objectives and their quantified plans as a guarantee that they shall get moving on and that they shall, out of their own will, exhibit the expected behaviors and none other.

Let’s focus for a moment on this notion of ownership or closer to the French language, this notion of appropriation (as in : “il est très important que Jean-Borg s’approprie ses objectifs”). This means the employee is expected to appropriate the objectives. Does it mean that the plan becomes the property of the employee in that it belongs to her or is it that this plan becomes a property of the said employee just like high ductility is a property of copper ? According to the second meaning, the introjection of the quantified objective is as performative as the order given by the master to the subordinate, but it belongs to a different order. It indeed pertains to programming, a programming of the type meant for machines. 

As Alain Supiot observes, ? […] this mobilization is aimed at minds as well as bodies, the mechanical obedience to orders giving way to programming as a mode of organization of work. ?

Reduced to the state of a programmed thing,  the employee becomes as predictable as an object submitted to mechanical forces and trade, which used to belong in great part to the domain of action, tends to slip down into the domain of work with the meaning of production or artifact that Hannah Arendt gives it in her seminal essay, The Human Condition, in which she breaks down human activity (as opposed to contemplation) into three fundamental realms :  labor, work and action.

The cost of interest

All this might only be a moral evil. But could it entail an economic one ? This can’t be ruled out…

The organization is expecting an optimal result out of the joint execution of individual programs by legions. Having appropriated their models to orient themselves and decide their priorities, the employees and their hierarchical superiors constantly appraise the cost-benefits of their actions in the light of the policies they have allegedly integrated. Quite logically, an agent won’t engage in any action that doesn’t serve his or her interest. He or she will make choices accordingly and will stop as fast as possible the action that has ceased to serve it. 

Chances are that this is how a multitude of ignored customers, unsatisfied requests and unaddressed crises are accumulating. Tightly defined, the interests at stake are constraining the thinking and the range of options made available to the parties involved when these are not in conflict among themselves. Indeed, with the ten thousand plan executions running across extended teams and multidimensional matrices - think of all the transverse roles and aggregates - the agents end up more often than not competing against each other. Depending on the policies, feeding one’s KPIs and quotas may mean being the first to tick the box, occupying the space with one’s speciality or product, hooking up one’s id number to an opportunity or supporting whatever possible combination of risks and opportunities that matches the objectives of an arbitrary, ephemereal alliance. 

Common to many large companies, these cases are too numerous and too specific to be developed here but they all exhibit this appalling trait : upon a change in scope or priorities leading to the quasi automatic withdrawal of an agent and no matter the consequences, the agent and her management both share the conviction that sheer disengagement in the absence of gain is in the superior interest of all parties for the pursuit of the authentic interest will always provide. Besides, all these parties, including the one which supports the immediate prejudice, if any, accept without flinching the defection of  the agent who don’t get the expected answer to the fairly legitimate question ? What’s in it for me ? ?. 

The belief that all are sharing is that the optimal balance will be compromised if anyone acts whereas his or her incentive plan can not account for his or her action : facilitating the resolution of an issue, taking care of a customer or a partner, mitigating the fault of a team member are as many initiatives that can be suspected of inefficiency or even deemed dangerous for the hive if they are not executed by those who have an express interest in doing so. Meanwhile, as long as no interest is directly compromised, no instrument is recording the negative externalities engendered by these breaches and as such, this would deserve a long development.

Finally, the same belief has it that the negative consequences of the issue, of the negligence or of the fault be as many regulation signals for those whose interest will suffer in fine, so that, owing to the anticipation or the actualization of the losses incurred by those - and only those - who will nominally suffer from their effects, the system will find by itself the best possible adjustments.

In this way, as long as he or she honors his interest, everyone can dismiss their judgment and ignore the problems of others. Each one can do so in good conscience and surrender to the feeling that a big, warm, providential thing beyond them is accomplishing itself with the daily miracle of programmed selfishness. 

The balance which used to dwell within conscience as an image of - or as awing as - the starry sky above, has become some opaque law of the universe.

The corrosion exerted by this moral which does not ask anything of us but our diligent egoism cannot but entail a generalized abdication of judgment and this may constitute the most serious threat to the health of the organizations, their growth and their abulity to heed abide by their social responsibility. 

In his comment on Mandeville’s fable, Dany-Robert Dufour enumerates the issues generated by this consequentialist and teleological moral which legitimates a present evil in the name of a greater good to come, the means in the name of the ends. In his view, this moral :

1. ‘allows the greatest cynicism on the part of decision makers’
2. proves ‘very abusive as one never knows for sure what can the long term consequence of an action be’
3. ‘allows one to exempt themselves from any appraisal of the action to undertake as long as it is supposed to yield positive results’
4. ‘sets moral (what avails for all) against ethics (what I dare to do, including against all) whereas the two notions were traditionally linked’.  

Beyond or rather before any philosophical reflection, these lines will hopefully invite us to use our free judgment and appraise the vicious threats that the incentivizing doctrine is posing to the enterprise, the individual…and their interests. 

 References

• Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Routledge Classics, 1944
• Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence, Duquesne University Press, 1974
• Alain Supiot, La gouvernance par les nombres, Fayard, p. 412
• Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, 1958
• Bernard de Mandeville, Dany Robert-Dufour, La Fable des Abeilles, Pocket, p.59-60