Loo’s, trains and board games
I think one of the most common mistakes people make when they put new measures into any business is underestimating the intelligence of the people they are measuring. I saw a strange example of this in the papers a few weeks ago, regarding the refit of trains for Southern Railway. They decided not to have toilets on the new trains – bizarrely defending their position by saying that 66% of their trains will still have loos. If I’m on a train with a five year old who needs a pee, the train either 100% does or 100% does not have a toilet!
This seems like a strange decision, until you look at the justification. They talk about increased capacity (makes sense: more fares for no extra rolling stock or operating costs), but there are also the reliability measures – a loo that goes wrong can take a train out of service – and of course removing the loo means that maintenance and cleaning costs go down. So some pretty sensible measures – fare revenue, capacity, reliability and maintenance costs – have resulted in a decision that seems totally nuts.
People are great at playing games
How does this happen? People are great at playing games. I don’t mean this in a derogatory sense. It’s no accident that people love playing chess, Modern Warfare and the rest. People are very, very good at taking a set of rules and making sure they get the outcome that is personally important to them. There’s a whole organisational behaviour dimension to this, and I’m not even going to touch that – but it’s worth thinking about the implied rules that you impose when you start to put measures, KPIs and targets into a business.
It might just be better to look at this as if you were writing the rule book for a new board game.
Next steps
- Measures, behaviour and the “Cobra Effect” – more on how measures drive unexpected behaviour
- Free GAMED book templates – design targets and incentives that can’t be gamed
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If you are in a monopoly situation with nominally 100% capacity utilisation and an incomplete set of KPIs then everything would drive you to remove the toilets. In the 21st century no-one builds a house with an outside loo or a hotel room with a shared toilet bacause no-one would buy such a thing. Unfortunately on the railway there is no choice for customers to vote with his/her er.. feet. This is where a senior manager or Director at Southern Rail should have said we don’t have to provide a toilet but we will because we have certain values – your rules! But if I was being really cynical maybe they don’t want children, people of advanced age, etc. etc. travelling on their busy trains!