The Mission Before the Metric
On change management, gamified incentives, and the easy way to lose the plot
The Token Trap
Last week I was reading a piece by Gergely Orosz on what he calls “tokenmaxxing.” Companies, eager to prove their employees are using AI, have started measuring adoption by tokens consumed. The more tokens you burn, the more “AI-native” you must be. The metric climbs, and the chart gets shared in the all-hands.
And of course, humans being humans, the metric gets gamed. Long, padded prompts. Openclaw instances (or any other personal assistant tool) that don’t bring any real value. Tokens spent for the sake of spending tokens. Somewhere in the middle of that vertical climb, the question quietly disappears: what were we trying to achieve in the first place?
I read it and thought about every cultural change I’ve led, and every one I’ve been on the receiving end of. The pattern is older than AI. The names and the dashboards change with the times, but the underlying failure is consistent: we reach for the tactic before we’ve done the work that makes it earn anything.
What We Forget Before We Push
We’re driven by incentives. That’s an observation, not a moral statement. Gamifying things works. Carrots work and so do sticks. Public dashboards work, often well enough that leaders treat them as a substitute for the harder, slower work that needs to come first.
The harder work is two questions, and they need to live in people’s heads before any incentive is announced:
What are we changing?
Why? What business outcome are we expecting from this change?
If those two questions aren’t engrained, the metric becomes the goal and the dashboard becomes the work. People will hit the number, and the company will mistake the number for the change. By the time leadership realizes “tokens spent” doesn’t equal “better engineers,” a quarter has been spent training the wrong reflex.
This is the most common way change initiatives quietly fail. The incentive isn’t usually wrong on its own. The problem is that nobody finished the sentence before reaching for it.
The Three Groups
Once the what and the why are clear, you can think about who you’re moving.
In every change I’ve led, the room has split into roughly three groups.
The early adopters move on their own. They’ve already been thinking about it, or they trust the direction. You don’t need to convince them, you need to hand them the keys. Done well, they become your most credible promoters, much more credible than you, because they’re not the ones being paid to push it.
The vast majority are persuadable but not eager. They’ll come along because the why makes sense and the mission resonates. Leaderboards don’t move them on their own. The leaderboard might help once they’re already moving, but what really moves them is understanding why this matters, and trusting that the people asking aren’t doing it for a quarterly slide.
The detractors won’t be convinced. Some are protecting something. Others don’t like the idea for reasons they may or may not articulate. A few are right, and you should listen carefully before assuming they’re not. The rest will come along eventually, late, mostly out of fear of being left behind, and that’s fine. Not everyone needs to believe. Pretending otherwise just leads to performative agreement, which is worse than honest dissent.
The Path of Least Resistance
Something I’ve come to believe over the years: people don’t dislike change so much as they dislike friction. We’re creatures of habit, yes, but more precisely, we’re creatures of efficiency. The known path is paved while the new one is still gravel. When the choice is “do the thing I’ve always done in two clicks” versus “learn a new tool, fight an unfamiliar UI, and produce something I don’t even know is good yet,” the brain picks gravel last every time.
So the first job of the leader driving the change is to pave the new path so aggressively that the old one stops being the easier one. Pushing harder doesn’t accomplish much when the old path is still smoother.
Show people exactly how to do it the new way. Document it, build templates, run lunch-and-learns, find the early adopters and ask them to build the visible examples. Make the first attempt frictionless, even if you have to absorb the cost personally.
And then watch for the first friction. This is the part most leaders miss. People who are already feeling the discomfort of doing something unfamiliar will drop the new way the instant they hit a snag. Not the third snag, the first one. A link that 404s, or a doc that’s out of date. They quietly revert, and they don’t tell you, because reverting feels less like failure than persisting and looking foolish.
Your job is to anticipate that first friction and remove it before they hit it. If you can’t anticipate it, react within hours, not weeks. Every time someone hits a wall and you fix it before they give up, you protect a believer.
The Contract Behind the Change
I wrote a few weeks ago about the unwritten contract between engineering leaders and the engineers they lead. I keep coming back to it because it sits underneath almost everything we do, and change management is no exception.
If you’re driving a change you don’t believe in, your engineers will know. Not from anything you say, but from the half-beat of hesitation when you describe the why, or from the slogans that don’t quite match how you talk privately. They read posture better than slides.
A change initiative is one of the moments where that contract gets stress-tested most. You’re asking people to do something uncomfortable, and the only currency you have to spend is their trust that you’re asking for the right reasons. If you spend that currency on something you yourself don’t think is right, the cost compounds. Every future change you try to drive becomes harder.
The corollary: if you’re being asked to drive a change you don’t believe in, that’s information. The job is to push back upstream until either the change makes sense, or you decide you can’t honestly carry it. Performing conviction you don’t have isn’t the answer.
Then, the Tactics
Once the what and the why are clear, the new path is paved, the first frictions are being hunted down, and you’re honest about what you’re asking, now you can reach for the tactical levers.
This is where gamification, dashboards, leaderboards, and public progress reviews start to work. They amplify a change that’s already moving, but they can’t create one from nothing.
But set them with care. Pick metrics that measure the outcome you said the change would deliver, not a proxy that’s easy to count. And don’t set them alone. Set guardrail metrics next to the headline ones, the kind that tell you when the dashboard is being gamed, or when the new way is being adopted only on the surface. Review them together. If the headline number is climbing while the guardrails are flashing red, the change isn’t working, no matter what the chart says, and you have to steer.
Metrics can always be played. That’s why you should never trust a single one in isolation.
I had a manager once who told me that as a leader driving a change, you should talk about it until people start making jokes about it. About the change, or about you for talking about it. The joke is when you know it’s landed, not the dashboard. The joke means it’s part of the room now, internalized enough to mock and familiar enough to riff on. That’s what cultural change looks like from the inside: a running gag, and the surest sign you’ve done the slow work right.
What Tokens Can’t Buy
Back to the tokenmaxxing piece, because it’s a useful mirror.
The companies counting tokens aren’t wrong to want their engineers using AI more. They might even be right about the strategic urgency. What they got wrong was the order. They reached for the metric before doing the work that makes the metric mean anything. They never defined what the change looks like in practice, why it matters in terms the engineers could believe in, what the new path looks like, or where the first frictions live. Without t
hat groundwork, the metric ends up being the only visible artifact of the change, so it becomes the thing that gets optimized.
Token counts go up. The actual change, engineers using AI to do better work and keep their judgment intact, may or may not happen, and the dashboard can’t tell you which one you got.
So if you’re about to push a change in your org, before you build the dashboard or announce the leaderboard, ask yourself the two questions and don’t move on until they’re answered.
What are we changing?
Why?
If the answers are clear, the rest gets easier. If they’re not, no amount of tactical incentive will save you.
Author Notes
I started writing this after reading Gergely Orosz’s piece on tokenmaxxing and noticing how much it overlapped with patterns I’ve seen for years, long before AI was the thing being pushed. The change is always the new shiny, but the failure mode rhymes: people skip the why and mistake the dashboard for the work.
The thing I find myself thinking about most these days is how much trust gets spent in change initiatives, more than most leaders realize. You only get a few of these in a single tour at a company before people stop showing up to the all-hands. Spend it on changes you believe in, and do the slow work first.