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Why Did They Do That?: Follow The Power Find The Incentive
Why do intelligent people inside powerful institutions keep producing outcomes almost nobody says they want?
We blame “the bank”, “the government”, “the regulator”. But institutions do not think, choose or ignore warnings. People do.
Why Did They Do That? replaces the convenient “they” with the people inside the who knew what, who could say no, what they risked by intervening and where the cost finally landed. Then it puts the system back around the targets, budgets, hierarchies, rewards and fear of blame that made one choice safer than another.
People make the choices. Systems load those choices.
From the 2008 mortgage chain and OxyContin to the Post Office Horizon scandal and the UK’s vaccine-injury compensation scheme, the book shows how decisions that look mad from outside become predictable from within, and why a fine, a target or a new rule can change nothing at all.
It then sets out Incentive Alignment Triangulation (IAT), a practical method
• testing whether an incentive really explains a failure
• defining what “good” actually means
• designing a fix that survives contact with real people, including knowing when to stop
Three questions carry it into any
• Who can say no?
• What do they lose by agreeing to the fix?
• Who pays when they don’t?
For leaders, managers, advisers, governors, investigators and anyone who has watched an institution do something baffling and asked why.
You won’t see the world more cynically. You will see it more clearly.
We blame “the bank”, “the government”, “the regulator”. But institutions do not think, choose or ignore warnings. People do.
Why Did They Do That? replaces the convenient “they” with the people inside the who knew what, who could say no, what they risked by intervening and where the cost finally landed. Then it puts the system back around the targets, budgets, hierarchies, rewards and fear of blame that made one choice safer than another.
People make the choices. Systems load those choices.
From the 2008 mortgage chain and OxyContin to the Post Office Horizon scandal and the UK’s vaccine-injury compensation scheme, the book shows how decisions that look mad from outside become predictable from within, and why a fine, a target or a new rule can change nothing at all.
It then sets out Incentive Alignment Triangulation (IAT), a practical method
• testing whether an incentive really explains a failure
• defining what “good” actually means
• designing a fix that survives contact with real people, including knowing when to stop
Three questions carry it into any
• Who can say no?
• What do they lose by agreeing to the fix?
• Who pays when they don’t?
For leaders, managers, advisers, governors, investigators and anyone who has watched an institution do something baffling and asked why.
You won’t see the world more cynically. You will see it more clearly.
172 pages, Paperback
Published October 14, 2026
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