Have you ever sat through a meeting where a senior director proposed a flawed idea, and despite knowing it would fail, you stayed quiet because everyone else was nodding along? Your silence wasn’t a lack of courage, it was a perfectly rational calculation within an invisible system.

In this episode, we explore why organisations full of talented, well-meaning individuals frequently produce mediocre results. We unpack the concept of 'strategic interdependence', where your best choice relies entirely on predicting what others will do, often trapping teams in 'bad equilibriums' that nobody actually wants:

• The Hidden Logic of Dysfunction: Why office snacks disappear in a week and shared kitchens stay dirty, not because people are greedy or lazy, but because they are optimising for a game they cannot opt out of.
• The Trap of Good Intentions: Why intelligence does not protect you from bad outcomes, and how the gap between what people want (efficiency, fairness) and what they do is dictated by the structures surrounding them.
• Systemic Solutions: Why telling employees to "try harder" or "care more" is futile. We discuss real structural fixes, such as changing feedback mechanisms or altering how supply allowances work, to make the rational individual choice align with the collective good.

Read the original essay on ⁠Substack⁠.

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