About

Behavior Follows Rewards is a newsletter about incentive architecture — the design of reward structures and the behaviors they produce. Not theory. Real decisions, real organizations, real consequences.

Every post takes a single real-world case — a company, a government program, a sports organization — and examines the incentive structure behind it. Not the stated goals. Not the public rationale. The actual reward system, and what it produced.

The pattern is consistent across domains and across decades: when you reward people for hitting a number, they hit the number. When the number is the wrong thing to measure, the organization moves in the wrong direction. Not because people are dishonest. Because behavior follows rewards.

Why This Matters

Organizations don't fail because their people are incompetent or their strategy is unclear. They fail because their reward structures systematically produce behaviors that work against the stated goal. The bank that rewarded account openings. The government program that rewarded heat pump installations. The school system that rewarded test scores. In each case, behavior followed the reward — exactly as designed. The outcomes were not.

Incentive architecture — the deliberate design of reward structures to produce specific behaviors — is not a new concept. Naming it, diagnosing it, and applying it as a systematic lens across organizations is. Most leaders encounter misaligned incentives as isolated crises. BFR treats them as a pattern with identifiable causes, repeating signatures, and correctable design flaws.

Why now? Because the speed of organizational decision-making has outpaced the discipline of incentive design. Performance dashboards, algorithmic metrics, and AI-driven feedback loops are creating faster and more powerful reward signals — with far less examination of what behaviors they are actually producing. The gap between intended outcome and actual behavior is widening. The cost of ignoring that gap is going up.

Who writes this

Wayne Repich is an enterprise growth and strategy executive with more than thirty years of experience advising organizations on how to build and execute strategy. He has worked across engineering, construction, risk consulting, and financial services — sectors where the gap between incentive design and organizational outcomes is visible, measurable, and consequential.

Behavior Follows Rewards is the foundation for a book of the same name, currently in development.

What you get

One case. One incentive pattern. Published free. No algorithm, no noise — just a clear-eyed look at why organizations behave the way they do, and what that means for anyone responsible for designing or executing strategy.

If this lands, subscribe.

BFR publishes every Saturday. Every issue examines a real case — a decision made, a reward designed, a behavior produced — and draws a principle worth carrying into your own work. It's free. You can read every issue without giving us a cent, and unsubscribe at any time with a single click.

Know someone who should read this?

If you're working alongside a leader, a manager, or anyone navigating an organization — send them this page. The conversation BFR is starting is one they need to be part of.