Diwang Malaya

There’s a famous story about colonial India that goes something like this.

Delhi had a problem with cobras, so the British government offered a cash reward for every dead cobra brought in. The idea was pretty straightforward: reward people for catching cobras, and eventually there should be fewer cobras.

Except the story goes that people eventually figured out that there was an easier way to make money. Instead of catching cobras, they could breed them. More cobras meant more rewards.

When the government eventually cancelled the program, the supposedly worthless snakes were released, making the original problem even worse.

It’s a great story.

There’s just one wrinkle: historians have found very little evidence that the cobra-breeding part actually happened the way the story is usually told. But the idea stuck because we’ve all seen versions of it.

The cobra effect is really about what happens when the thing we measure or reward becomes a substitute for the thing we actually care about. And the more I think about it, the more I realize how easily this happens.

Imagine a hospital where one of the big measures of success is patient survival. At first glance, that sounds perfectly reasonable. Of course we want more patients to survive.

But what happens when a doctor has to decide between taking a relatively healthy patient with a very good chance of survival, and taking someone critically ill whose chances are much lower?

The second patient is harder to save. And if their death counts against the hospital’s survival statistics, suddenly the system has created a strange incentive.

Nobody had to tell the doctor to turn away the sickest patients. The numbers can do that quietly. The same thing can happen with policing. If what we constantly celebrate is the number of arrests, then arrests become a very visible sign of productivity.

But arrests aren’t the same thing as safer communities. And this is why I think the conversation about “arrest quotas” in the Philippines is worth looking at carefully. The PNP has denied having official arrest quotas, while also emphasizing that public safety shouldn’t simply be reduced to hitting arrest numbers.

That distinction matters. Because sometimes the problem isn’t that someone is deliberately trying to game the system.

Sometimes they’re just doing what makes sense within the system they’ve been given.

We see versions of this everywhere. A teacher is told that test scores matter, so naturally test scores get attention. An employee is told that productivity means the number of tasks completed, so naturally the task count starts to matter. A government office is assessed according to how many applications it processes, and suddenly processing applications becomes the thing everyone gets very good at.

None of this necessarily means people are lazy, dishonest, or incompetent. In fact, they may be doing exactly what we asked them to do. That’s what makes the whole thing so interesting.

People don’t just respond to instructions. We respond to incentives.

And sometimes the incentive is stronger than the intention. I’ve started thinking about this whenever I hear someone propose a new KPI, target, bonus, ranking, scorecard or performance metric.

Before asking whether the number is going up, maybe we should ask:

If people become really, really good at achieving this number, what else might happen?

What behaviour are we encouraging? What behaviour are we quietly discouraging? What becomes worth doing? What becomes not worth doing?

And perhaps most importantly:

Are we measuring the thing we actually care about, or just the thing that’s easiest to count?

Because there’s a funny little trap here. We create a measurement because we want to change behaviour. Then, eventually, we start judging the behaviour by the measurement. And somewhere along the way, the measurement becomes the goal.

Parang yung cobra. We wanted fewer snakes. We ended up creating an incentive around dead snakes.

The number was easy to count. The consequences were much harder to see. Maybe that’s something worth remembering, especially now, when so much of our lives is being turned into numbers, scores, rankings and metrics.

What gets measured gets attention.

What gets rewarded gets repeated.

And sometimes, if we really want to understand a system… we should stop listening to what it says it wants.

And quietly look at what it rewards.