The Incentives Are Working
Conversations with people who paid the highest price for purpose-driven work, and what their stories say about how these systems are designed.
Not personal failings
The first phase of the study listened to people across environmental governance, technology and engineering, hospitality, financial services, marketing, clinical psychology, the public service and the not-for-profit sector. Every conversation ran under Chatham House rules, and participants are described by role and sector only.
The study asks what happens when structural, relational and embodied support is absent, so the need for it can no longer be dismissed as individual experience or anecdote. Its argument is that burnout, moral injury and invisible labour aren’t personal failings. They’re the predictable outputs of systems that were never designed to account for the full cost of the work they depend on.
The name comes from that argument: nothing here is broken, because the incentives are working exactly as designed.
Seven working hypotheses
What the conversations keep returning to
The findings from the first phase are still being written up. These four themes came through early and clearly.
Values are the rope.
The most committed people stay longest in the conditions costing them most, and that isn’t a character flaw but the mechanism itself, which appeared in the overwhelming majority of conversations.
Solidarity is what helps people survive.
The participant who came through most intact found peers who named the same experience, and once the suffering was visibly shared, the self-doubt lifted. Another, with a similar distance from the work but no collective witness, left broken and disheartened.
Conditions matter more than hours.
One participant works around seventy hours a week and loves it, yet in a previous role a similar load was destroying her mental health: the same person, with the same capacity and the same hours, in entirely different conditions.
People are hungry to be heard.
Conversations scoped at forty-five minutes often ran to two hours, and almost everyone asked to hear the findings, a hunger for witness that is itself evidence for the study’s central claim.
Findings from The Incentives Are Working
Shorter pieces drawn from the conversations, published as the analysis develops.
Phase 2: finding the leverage point
The first phase listened to the people carrying the cost: founders, leaders and changemakers working inside structures that reproduce the very conditions they set out to change.
Phase 2 turns outward, to the people with the power to change those conditions. That means impact investors, funders and practitioners already working in the cracks, many of them long practised in the parts of being human that systems teach us to exile. It asks not only what gets funded, but how capital, support and leadership conditions shape the people building what comes next, and what those already doing this work have learned about where to intervene.
I’ll be sharing more about Phase 2 soon.
An economy that remembers what it’s for
If the incentives are working exactly as designed, the more useful question is what they could be designed for instead, and economists have been answering it for years. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics describes a safe and just space for humanity, where everyone’s needs are met without overshooting the limits of the living planet, and the Wellbeing Economy Alliance pushes towards an economy measured by how well people and places thrive rather than how fast output grows. Regenerative and ecological economics add that the living systems we depend on have to be restored, not only spared.
What the study adds is the layer those models tend to leave for someone else. An economy could meet human needs within ecological limits and still ask the people running it to abandon themselves, because the intention underneath it, the answer to what all of this is for, was never examined. The people I spoke with named honesty, trust, care, fairness, collaboration and autonomy as the values that mattered most, and not one of them named money or status. An economy built from those values would have to hold human dignity and the health of the planet together with that deeper question of purpose, since tending one while neglecting the others is how the old pattern returns in a new shape.
I explore this further in a reflection, What is the economy for?
Bring the findings to your team
If you lead a purpose-driven organisation and want to understand what the work is costing your people, or you’d like me to talk about the study, I’d like to hear from you.
Letters from the map
New writing as it’s published, news of the deck, and the occasional note on the work.