Incentives working against change

Often, when people are baffled by why change can't happen, they don't consider incentive systems. Incentive systems take many forms. Here are a couple:

* Individual bonuses. These create a competitive culture within the team, and that typically leads to hoarding skills and information. When you're rewarded for being "the best," you will not help the competition (your teammates) get better. It can also lead to people burning out as they work long hours to reach the top. Consequently, good ideas and skills do not infuse out to the organization as a whole.

In particularly bad organizations, individual bonuses create a crony "old boys" system (and given the rampant sexism and misogyny in tech, it usually is boys). Managers reward people they like. This can happen even if it's not deliberate. People tend not to put much thought into why their "gut" tells them to pass out the rewards to particular people.

Of course, incentives can go both ways. If you reward people for helping, teaching, and mentoring others, the incentives are moving the entire organization toward improvement. Even so, it's best to reward the entire team for improving itself, not an individual. Otherwise, you're setting up another competitive system.

* Social incentives. The Dunning-Krueger study on perceived competence is essential reading. The gist is that incompetent people almost always overestimate their competence (and conversely, highly competent people often underestimate their competence). You don't know what you don't know. One of the cases in the original paper involved students evaluating their competence in English grammar—the vast majority of incompetent people put themselves in the 90th percentile. One reason for that is they judged their competence by talking to their friends, none of whom were competent. Those social interactions effectively incentivized people to not assess themselves against objective standards. They didn't see the need. Incorrect beliefs (e.g., testing slows you down) perpetuate because that's what your friends believe. Outsiders, who try to bring in a different point of view, are not part of the group and are usually discounted or even ostracized.

There are, of course, more incentive-related issues, but when change is hard, it can't hurt to identify the incentives that are pushing people towards the status quo.