Your bonus structure rewards short-term thinking. Your top performer hoards knowledge. Your carefully planned shift schedule gets gamed within a week. Boardgame designers have spent decades solving these exact problems, and their solutions reveal something crucial: the system you design is never the system you get.
There's a dangerous myth in tech: that becoming an expert means putting on blinders. We celebrate specialization. The database guru, the React wizard, the network architect, and rightly so. Deep expertise matters. But somewhere along the way, we've started confusing specialization with tunnel vision, and that's where careers go to die.