Stop Demanding Performance
Often in life, we want something from someone else. For example, as a citizen we want a politician to enact some policy, as a regulator we want a company to secure people’s data effectively, or as a customer we want a company to behave in a way we find ethical. A through line to these examples is that while we can clearly articulate the overall goal, just knowing the goal doesn’t necessarily tell the other party what actions it must take to achieve it. Unfortunately, the implicit incentives we give to people often encourages them to do things at odds with actually achieving our goal.
Consider a legislator in the minority, who wants to accomplish some goal (and their constituents do too). One way they might go about this is to hold a press conference and loudly castigate the majority for their opposition to this policy. Another way would be to hold private meetings with key, sympathetic, members of the majority and get small elements of the policy incorporated into their bills. The first approach has the benefit of being emotionally satisfying, and being something clear that can be pointed to. The second approach does more to actually achieve the goal, but in a way that’s much harder to articulate as “pursuing the objective as hard as possible”.
Lots of situations in life are like this, where there’s a loud way to accomplish very little and a quiet way to do some good. And far too often, we reward people for doing the loud ineffective thing. We reward them for putting on a show for us, not for accomplishing the goal we wanted. Put in those terms, the critique of our collective behavior is so obvious its hardly worth making. But it is worth stating there’s a reason we all behave this way: because the performative thing viscerally communicates to us that the person is on our side and that they’re doing something. And we value that, because in cases where incentives are not aligned, “I tried really hard in private, and have not a lot to show for it” isn’t reassuring! Further, while I’ve presented the loud option as being inherently ineffectual, that’s not necessarily the case, sometimes it may work!
Rewarding people for private behavior that we can’t assess isn’t realistic, and probably doesn’t make sense. But what we can do is withhold rewarding people for things that are performative, and for which they can’t show results. A company loudly announces their newly empowered security organization after a breach? That’s nice, but do they have an increased budget or new capacity to institute necessary controls? A politician loudly denounces the opposition party’s bill, but does their speech impact public opinion or secure any defectors from the opposition party? When there’s no impact to performance, we shouldn’t reward it.
But more important, we shouldn’t demand performance proactively. We shouldn’t be upset that a politician isn’t giving a loud speech when they simply don’t have the votes, to do otherwise is to communicate quite explicitly that we want to be misled, and we ourselves don’t care about the results.