Influence

A year ago, I wrote High water mark, about the way that expectations tend to rise with results. Unchecked, this leaves you in a situation where eventually, inevitably, those expectations are too high to meet — kind of like a generalised Peter principle. I argued that the problem happens when the only influence on expectations is upwards, and I'd like to dig in to that idea of influence a little more.

I quite like the idea of loosely analysing motivation in terms of incentives. You don't need to understand every crevice of someone's psyche to analyse their behaviour, and you don't need to control every aspect of someone's behaviour to get them to do what you want. All you need are the broad strokes: what do they want, and does what you want help them get it? If that high-level connection between your goals and theirs is there, then the details aren't terribly important. And if it's not, no amount of micromanagement can really help you.

Influence is the generalisation of that idea. Much like you can broadly analyse someone's behaviour by the influence of their incentives, you can broadly analyse other systems by the influences that pull them in various directions. For example, in Control I wrote about the upward influences of personalisation and individual power on control, and in WONTFIX I wrote about the influence of not tolerating flaws on the way you make decisions. These are factors that don't dictate the behaviour of the system directly, but affect the way it changes over time.

In these cases and others, the answer often isn't to remove that influence; more control is a good thing, avoiding flaws is a good thing, and most influences are good (or the bad ones are pretty obvious and tend to be already dealt with). However, without any balancing influences, you get a system that only moves in one direction. An unchecked movement towards any influence is usually dangerous, because that leads to extreme behaviour and many situations are better served by nuance.

So I believe it's important to look out for situations with unbalanced influences. If there is something that pulls you towards working harder, is there something else that pulls you towards relaxation? One thing that makes you more stable and another that stops you getting stuck in a rut? What balances your influences to stop them from getting out of control?