@the_30_rule: They paid people to kill cobras. So people started farming cobras. There is a study called the Cobra Effect, and it is a real story. Way back, in India, there were far too many cobras. You could be walking down the street and one comes out of nowhere and bites you. So the government said, we have to fix the cobra problem. Their solution was a bounty. Kill a cobra, bring us the skin, we will pay you. The intention was good. Motivate people to hunt them and bring the population down. What actually happened is people gamified it. They opened cobra farms. Breed the cobras, grow them, kill them, turn in the skins, collect the money. It got so widespread that the government caught on, got angry, and cancelled the whole scheme. Which left every one of those farms holding a lot of cobras they now had no use for. So they released them into the wild. By the time it was over, the cobra problem was worse than before the government got involved. The moral is the part that matters for anybody running a team. Motivating people the wrong way leads to worse results than not motivating them at all. Which is worth remembering the next time you build a contest around one number. Pay for covers and somebody rushes tables. Pay for average check and somebody oversells a guest who did not want it. Restaurant training systems get judged by whether the behaviour happens, not by what the behaviour costs you somewhere else. Hospitality training has to name the outcome you actually want, or people will optimise for the metric instead. Designing the incentive so it cannot be gamed is restaurant leadership. Your restaurant culture decides whether somebody games it when they spot the gap. Guest experience is usually what gets traded away first. Retention and accountability both suffer when the scoreboard rewards the wrong thing. #restaurantowner #hospitality #leadership #incentives

Preston Lee

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Region: US

Wednesday 14 October 2026 01:00:11 GMT