Points Theatre

Employees in many organizations experience organizational systems that are fundamentally designed to “get more points” for creating what you could call “productivity artifacts”.

We are all familiar with them. Artifacts such as emails, meeting with their agendas and action items, and PowerPoint slides typically full of way too many words and overstuffed data charts instead of effective visuals.

There can be an institutional addiction to collecting the most “points” for starting initiatives but not really ever finishing them.

To be fair, this is how we often incentivize our people, painting a certain picture of what achievement should look like. A key challenge comes in the way this fosters a form of productivity theatre. It may hold some value but is often not the greater, as in better, value.

Designing, creating and curating healthy performant environments need to turn this points game towards thinking deeply, questioning the status quo (not status quo building) and adaptive behaviors needed for creating change. 

Moving payload, A.K.A. the work, is most often a productivity and efficiency game of volume. More is better. Bigger is better. You know the mantras.

I’d suggest that designing the system around people, mission, and organizational purpose is another issue, entirely. It requires an alternative people architecture that, among many things, will increase the clarity about what an organization is trying actually accomplish and how to do it with increased speed, quality, and value.