Playing to Win, or Playing to Not Lose?

Are you playing to win, or are you playing to not lose?

You can't be outcomes-focused and compliance-driven at the same time — not because it's a nice philosophical distinction, but because the mechanics don't allow it. A compliance focus creates decision friction: every action gets routed through "is this the correct process" rather than "is this the right outcome." That friction creates a perverse incentive, because the fastest way for anyone to protect themselves is to follow the process precisely, whether or not it actually serves the customer. One approach prioritises the goal. The other prioritises the process. Only one of them moves at the speed your customers expect.

This is one thread in the fuller picture of why capable teams get bogged down — and the same pattern shows up across local government too, covered in the Council Operational Performance hub.

What gets measured gets managed

Compliance-focused organisations run a specific risk: the illusion of efficiency, without the reality of it. It's much easier to build a KPI around "was the process followed" than "did we deliver real value" — so that's usually what gets measured, and what gets managed, even when nobody intends it that way. Economists have a name for this pattern: Goodhart's Law — when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure, because people rationally start optimising for the number rather than the thing the number was meant to represent. Staff aren't being lazy or difficult when they optimise for the visible metric over the real goal — they're being entirely rational. The result isn't just weaker outcomes. It's measurably slower delivery, because every extra check or approval adds time without adding value.

Over time, this produces trained incapacity: people discouraged from routinely exercising judgement, because compliance and risk-aversion are what get rewarded, eventually lose the confidence and the fitness to exercise it at all. Then a complex issue nobody anticipated turns up, and the judgement muscle isn't there anymore. You end up with a workforce that looks productive on the metrics, and struggles the moment something unexpected happens — which, in this environment, is most of the time.

Adaptive Mastery

The way out isn't more oversight. It's building real capability, setting a clear outcome, and getting out of the way — what I call Adaptive Mastery. This isn't just intuition: psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's self-determination theory — one of the most heavily tested frameworks in organisational psychology — consistently finds that autonomy is a basic human need, and that autonomy-supportive environments produce higher engagement and better performance, while controlling ones produce burnout and disengagement. Three things make Adaptive Mastery work in practice:

• Micro-skills. Get genuinely good at the small, transferable skills and the subject-matter knowledge that actually drive good judgement calls — this is what makes autonomy safe to hand over.
• Outcome-focused KPIs. Relax the procedural monitoring and measure the result instead. This removes the perverse incentive directly — you can't optimise for procedural correctness if it's no longer what's being measured.
• Guard rails. Give people a genuine "failure budget" — room to make a call and occasionally get it wrong — so decisive action feels safe, not risky.

Is your team playing to win, or simply playing to not lose?

The Friction Factor survey gives you a quick first read on which one your organisation is actually doing.