If you pick your utility functions poorly, people start adapting to them with unintended consequences: - Burndown charts: Burn lots of tasks fast, even if you

If you pick your utility functions poorly, people start adapting to them with unintended consequences: - Burndown charts: Burn lots of tasks fast, even if you are creating more work in the process. - IBM once rated employees based on added lines of code. The result? An explosion of code. Even code that wasn't strictly necessary. - Stack ranking: punish the lowest 20%, reward the top 20%. Sounds reasonable at first, but what happens when employees adapt to it? People stop hiring strong candidates. So over time, when people leave, their replacements get worse over time creating a downwards spiral of worsening talent.