[smif]

> I'm not sure there are any solutions other than customized and active management.

I think this is the real issue here. People are not replaceable parts and it's very hard to come up with generalizeable solutions.

Maybe one thing we could do as an industry is switch mindsets from predictive models (i.e. "if we just implement XYZ methodology, the team will do better") to reactive models (i.e. "something is going wrong, we should try to understand it and change something"). This is probably just a roundabout way of describing the customized and active management that you mentioned, but I also think that sometimes these problems can be structural.

For example, sometimes a team member leaving can have detrimental effects because they weren't just a programmer, they were also the social glue holding the team together. Conversely, sometimes adding (or replacing) someone can bring about a situation where it feels like there are too many cooks in the kitchen, even if the overall team size hasn't changed much (or at all).

Maybe one area to look at with respect to people gaming the system is around people's personal values and how they track with the org's. These can be hard to gauge and people will intentionally misrepresent them because they want that job and the money that comes with it, so they are prepared to say what you want to hear. Also in larger organizations, sometimes the values statements are very dilute and not really saying anything. For example, saying "success" is a value is pretty useless because everyone wants to succeed. That's not a value, that's just effectively a no-op generic filler statement.