Post 3 — Playing to Lose

Every week I take one real case — a company, a government program, a league — and show how the reward shaped the behavior. Welcome to Behavior Follows Rewards.

At the 2012 London Olympics, the rules disqualified eight athletes for doing exactly what the tournament was built to reward.

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 or by accident, but repeatedly, on purpose. Spectators booed. Officials issued warnings. And the players played on.

This post is about a sports tournament. But the structure that produced what happened that night is not unique to sports. Whenever a reward system creates a secondary objective — one that runs parallel to the stated goal — people follow the one that matters more. That pattern shows up in corporate compensation, in sales incentive programs, in performance reviews. Here it surfaces in front of a booing Olympic crowd. Behavior Follows Rewards reaches readers across industries and geographies — this case is drawn from the Olympic Games, but the structure it exposes is not.

The tournament format was designed to produce more competition. It also produced a bracket. The bracket made finishing position more valuable than winning a single match. When those two rewards diverged, eight world-class athletes chose the one that mattered. They were disqualified. The format was redesigned before the next Games.

Both teams were trying to lose.

The 2012 Games introduced something new to Olympic badminton: a group stage before the knockout rounds. Sixteen teams played round-robin in four groups. Top two from each group advanced to the quarterfinals.

That format sounds fair. It also creates a bracket. And once you have a bracket, who you face in the quarterfinals depends on where you finish in your group.

China entered with two of the world’s top women’s doubles pairs. In a pure elimination format, that’s a problem — they would eventually have to play each other before the final. In the group-stage format, the conflict was manageable. Win your group, your seeded rival finishes second in theirs, and you end up on opposite sides of the draw. Both teams could reach the gold-medal match.

Then Denmark upset China’s second pair, Zhao Yunlei and Tian Qing. The math changed immediately. If China’s top pair — Wang Xiaoli and Yu Yang — won their remaining group match, they would meet Zhao and Tian in the semifinals. China’s best chance at two medals required Wang and Yu to lose.

They played accordingly. Serves into the net. Returns wide. The crowd understood what it was watching.

The incentive structure had not changed the players. It had changed what winning meant.

The South Korean pair across the net had their own calculation. A win would put them against the other South Korean pair in the quarterfinals — a matchup neither team nor the Korean program wanted. Losing moved them to a better bracket position.

In a second match that evening, a different South Korean pair faced Indonesia. Both had already qualified. Both had structural reasons to lose. The pattern repeated.

By the end of the night, the Badminton World Federation had charged all four pairs — eight athletes — with “not using one’s best efforts to win a match” and “conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport.”

All four were disqualified.

The players were treated as if they had done something wrong. Had they?

Let's go deeper with this. The disqualification felt like a verdict on the players' character. It wasn't. Every pair on that court had spent years training to be exactly this rational. The tournament asked one question and rewarded a different answer -- then punished the athletes for reading the actual question correctly.

Every pair on that court had spent years training for exactly this moment. They were at the Olympic Games. The objective was not to win every match — it was to win a medal. And the tournament structure they were playing under made a calculated loss in one group-stage match the optimal path to that goal.

The reward the format offered was not “win this match.” It was “finish in the bracket position that maximizes your medal chances.” Those are different things. The players responded to the reward that was actually on offer.

When you design a tournament — or a company, or a government program, or a school — you set up a reward structure. Both teams were trying to lose. If the two are the same, the behavior you get is the behavior you wanted. If they’re not, you get world-class athletes serving into the net in front of a booing Olympic crowd.

Both teams were trying to lose.

The officials who created the group-stage format wanted more: matches, competition, television content. They got all of it. They also built in a structural incentive to lose at exactly the wrong moment — and eight athletes followed it to its logical end.

The BWF changed the format before the next Olympics. For Rio 2016, teams finishing second in their groups were placed into a randomized draw to determine their quarterfinal opponents — eliminating any bracket advantage from a deliberate loss. The incentive that had produced the behavior was gone. The behavior did not recur.

There is a coda. After the disqualifications, China’s General Administration of Sports placed Yu Yang and Wang Xiaoli on a list of 100 athletes to be honored nationally. The reason: they had won the Uber Cup that year, qualifying them as world champions. The Olympic disqualification was irrelevant to that reward structure. They had followed the BWF’s incentives to their logical end and been punished for it. They had followed China’s national sports incentives to their logical end and been rewarded for it. Two systems. Two rewards. Both rational.

Where in your competitive strategy does winning a short-term contest cost you a longer-term position — and have you designed your incentives against that?

Ask yourself: what behavior in your organization is the system making rational, even if it isn't what you want? Before disciplining someone for doing the wrong thing, check whether you designed the reward structure that made it the right thing. Eight athletes were disqualified at the Olympics. The rules were what failed, not the players.

If you are working through an incentive design challenge in your organization — trying to understand why a policy, initiative, or team isn’t doing what you designed it to do — that is the work. Advisory Services →

Behavior Follows Rewards. The pattern shows up wherever people are measured and rewarded.

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—Wayne

Going Deeper

If you were one of those eight players in London — knowing that winning the next match meant meeting your own country's best pair in the quarterfinal, and losing it meant a clear run at a medal — would you have played to win? Or would you have done what the bracket was quietly paying you to do?

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Last time: Connecticut doubled its bottle deposit to incentivize recycling. What it incentivized was a four-state arbitrage market — and a cascade of corrections.

Next: Eddie Lampert was compared to a young Warren Buffett. He believed in free markets so deeply that he built one inside the company he ran. Then the incentives he designed drove his own flagship brand off the shelves of its own stores.

In development — a corporation whose internal ranking system made employees compete against each other instead of the competition; a pro sports league that rewarded losing for four decades. More on the way.

Sources

Badminton World Federation — “London 2012: Four Pairs Have Been Disqualified.” Official ruling and press release, August 1, 2012.

Peters, Justin — “Shuttlecock and Bull: Eight Badminton Players Have Been Disqualified from the Olympics for Tanking.” Slate, August 1, 2012.

ESPN — “Eight Badminton Players Disqualified for Trying to Lose.” August 1, 2012.

Associated Press (republished by France 24, byline “News Wires,” article text credited “AP —”) — “Olympic Badminton Players Disqualified for Throwing Games.” August 1, 2012.

Badminton World Federation — “London 2012: Koreans’ Appeal Rejected; Indonesia’s Withdrawn.” August 1, 2012.

Inside the Games — “Disgraced Chinese Badminton Duo Honoured Despite Disqualification at London 2012.”

Caci, Nicole — “Olympic Badminton Rules Shift for Rio After Cheating Scandal in 2012.” Sports Illustrated, July 31, 2016.

BFR is written to be accessible, welcomed, and celebrated by every reader — not simplified, not elevated. Just clear.