Post 3 — Playing to Lose
On July 31, 2012, a women’s doubles badminton match at the London Olympics stopped the crowd mid-applause. Players were serving into the net — not occasionally, not accidentally. Deliberately.
Bonus Post — A Bottle Is a Bottle
Connecticut designed a perfect recycling incentive. It forgot to specify who got to respond. This case came to BFR through James McDonough, a reader in Connecticut who recognized the pattern unfolding in his own backyard — and took the time to bring it here. That is precisely the kind of observation
Post 2 — How to Win a Lawsuit and Lose a Sport
He fought for three years to change the rules. The rules changed. So did everything else. Jonathan Skrmetti fought for three years to give college athletes economic freedom. He won. A year later, he called the result a “train wreck” and said it was “sucking the life out of college
Bonus Post — What's Your Target?
How Egypt turned a single answer into a squash dynasty.
A bonus post is coming Wednesday, June 10. Here's why it couldn't wait.
A reader sent me a case. James McDonough lives in Connecticut. He recognized the pattern unfolding in his own backyard and took the time to bring it here. That is precisely the kind of observation this newsletter exists to surface. Thank you, James. In 2024, Connecticut doubled its bottle deposit
Post 1 — When the Metric Became the Mission
Every reward system faces the same risk: the metric can be satisfied without producing what the metric was meant to measure. When that gap opens, the behavior follows the reward — not the mission. The gap is almost never visible until after the fact. Duolingo is a language-learning platform — forty
A bonus post is coming Wednesday. Here's why it couldn't wait.
Most of what I write here is about systems that produced the wrong behavior. Boards that burned heat into empty buildings. Banks that rewarded accounts instead of relationships. Organizations that hit their targets and destroyed their objectives in the process. This Wednesday is different. On May 16, an 18-year-
What do Wells Fargo, a UK heat program, and Israeli daycares have in common?
Three institutions. Three industries. Three eras. Each one built a system to change behavior. Each one got exactly what it rewarded. None of them got what they wanted.
Start here.
Every system produces exactly the behavior it rewards. Not the behavior it intends. Not the behavior it describes in the mission statement. The behavior it rewards. That's the thesis. Three words: behavior follows rewards. This publication is built around that idea — applied to real decisions, real institutions, and