We do not have to be a trained psychoanalyst to know this much — we humans are wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Referred to as the “pleasure principle” it was made famous by Sigmund Freud in German as “lustprinzip.”
It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the preference for “soft-targets” is a near universal phenomenon. Anyone designing a government performance management system (GPMS) must assume we humans have a preference for soft targets.
Given this seemingly reasonable assumption about human behavior, the key to designing an effective GPMS lies in creating protocols that tend to create incentives for those covered by the GPMS in such a way that the pursuit of one’s own ‘self-interest’ promotes the desired ‘public interest.’ I have found following design elements to be helpful in this regard…Read more
Author: Professor Prajapati Trivedi, Senior Fellow (Governance) and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy, ISB.
Source: This article is extracted from PA Times dated December 07, 2017.