Incentives

Identifying incentives at play

• What incentives are at play ? What is the reason behind the behavior you can observe?
• What people hope when they are performing an action, what do they get?
• Are there some behaviors which are difficult to explain?
  • What incentives could explain those behavior?

Identifying your own incentives

• To what type of incentives are you vulnerable?
• Is there situations where you are manipulated by incentives?

Framing an incentive structure

• What are the behaviors you want to foster?
• How could you use incentives to drive the behavior you need?

Cooperation

Identifying potential cooperation

Existing cooperation

• What types of cooperation already exist in your environment?
• Why does cooperation exist?
• How does the cooperation works?

Potential cooperation

• What do they want?
• What task could be performed more efficiently by somebody else at the same or lower cost?
• What value could you bring?
• What task that you are accomplishing could be valuable to somebody else?
• What cooperation opportunities do you have?
• Is there external actors that you could bring on stage?

Framing a robust cooperation

• Why will they chose you ?
• How could you make the most of this cooperation?
  • How could you increase the value you get from this cooperation?
  • How could you decrease the effort that this cooperation cost you?
• Do you trust the person with who you want to collaborate?
• Will a potential cooperation will make you totally dependent on the other part and thus more fragile?

Tendency to Minimize Energy Output

• How could you reduce your efforts without reducing the value you produce?
• What more efficient process could you develop to reduce the amount of work you have to throw in?
• What does require a lot of work?
• Could you spot a inefficient process?
  • What makes it inefficient?
• Are you locked in an inefficient process?
• Is the cost of change locking you in a way of operating?
• Are you resistant to change or risk taking?
• Is your thinking process thorough?
• How could you produce something more efficient?

Evolution by Natural Selection

• What is the environment you have to live in?
• Has a change in condition happened?
• What are the selection criteria?
• What are the favourable traits you possess related to the environment?
• Which traits are favourable in the short term and in the long term?
• How could you obtain those favourable traits?
• What are the external pressures?
• What characteristics have changed over the years?
• Who decides what can continue to live?
• Are you able to adapt quickly to potential changes?

Adaptation

• Are you becoming less and less successful in your environment?
• How could you innovate?

Exaptation

• What are your options at your disposal?
• Could you use what you already have in a certain way that will work in this environment?

The Red Queen Effect (Co-evolutionary Arms Race)

• What does your environment consist of?
• How do you define success in your environment?
• What are the pressures that exist in your environment?
• How could you adapt to the pressures in your environment?
• What are your competitors doing to adapt to those pressures?
• Are you entering an arm race?
• What could you do differently to avoid the arm race?

Competition

• What is the resource everyone is fighting for?
• How scarce is the resources?
• Is the resource limited?
• What makes the resource limited?
• Could you increase the resource?
• Can you make more of the resource you get?
• How is the resource acquired?
• What is the cost associated to the acquisition of the resource?
• How the cost of acquisition is evolving?
• Is there a winner takes all effect?
• Is the confrontation direct or indirect?

Ecosystems

• Who are the different actors in your ecosystems?
• What are their main functions?
• What are the main interactions between them?
• Is there a key players on which a lot of things rely on?
• What is the bottleneck of your ecosystem?
• Is the ecosystem resilient?
• Are people working together?
• Is the ecosystem showing competition or cooperation?
• What externality could affect the ecosystem?
• What are the external factors required to keep your ecosystem going?

Hierarchical and Other Organizing Instincts

• How could you make people feel better about belonging to the group?
• What does this hierarchical structure brings in terms of benefits?
• Who is at the top of the hierarchy?
• Why this person is at the top of the hierarchy?
• Is the hierarchy evolving through time or is it fixed?
• Is the hierarchy putted into question?

Self-Preservation Instincts

• Are you confronted to deadly situation?
• Are you trying to avoid the pain?
  • are you staying in your comfort zone?
• Could what you are avoiding lead you to deadly consequence?

Replication

• What others are doing?
• Are you trying to add some innovation and improvements in the process?
• Are you replicating errors in your replication process?
• Are you building something that could be used easily by other in different situation, in other words is it easily replicable?

Simple Physiological Reward-Seeking

Ecosystems

• Who are the different actors in your ecosystems?
• What are their main functions?
• What are the main interactions between them?
• Is there a key players on which a lot of things rely on?
• What is the bottleneck of your ecosystem?
• Is the ecosystem resilient?
• Are people working together?
• Is the ecosystem showing competition or cooperation?
• What externality could affect the ecosystem?
• What are the external factors required to keep your ecosystem going?

Niches

• Are you doing something specific or broad?
• What specific conditions do you need to exist?
• Is the environment you are operating in stable?
• Did you manage to maintain flexibility?
• Is there any other competitors in your environment?

Dunbar’s Number

• What relationships do you want to prioritize?