Haute Lumière

Commerce · I.01 · MMXXVI · daylight

La Bourse  /  Volume I  /  Nº I.01  /  Workbook — the Gainshare employee

WORKBOOK — THE LUMINOUS GAINSHARE EMPLOYEE

Chapter I.01 · The Ninety Days

For the person working inside a gainshare arrangement — where a defined share of verified improvement returns to the people who created it. This workbook is about reading the mechanism from the inside, contributing to it deliberately, and asking for what the arithmetic already says you are owed.

---

WHAT A GAINSHARE ACTUALLY IS

A gainshare is a written promise with four parts. If any one is missing, it is not a gainshare — it is a discretionary bonus wearing the word.

1. A baseline. What was true before. Agreed, signed, dated.
2. A measure. How improvement is computed, precisely enough that two people get the same answer.
3. A share. The percentage of verified improvement that returns to the people, stated as a number.
4. A period and a verifier. When it is computed, and by whom.

Everything in this workbook follows from one observation: those four parts are identical to the four parts of the regeneration facility in Chapter I.01. The firm finances a regenerative change out of the savings it produces; a gainshare returns a share of verified improvement to the people who produced it. Same structure, different beneficiary.

That means you are not a passenger in this chapter. You are already operating the instrument it describes. What follows is how to operate it well.

---

PART ONE — DISCOVERY

Days 1–30: find where the gain actually comes from

Exercise 1.1 — Trace your own line (2 hours)

Take your last gainshare statement, or the scheme document if you have not had a statement yet, and answer these in writing:

1. What exactly is the baseline, and what date was it set?
2. What is the measure, in a formula?
3. What is the share percentage, and is it of gross improvement or net of costs?
4. Who verifies, and when?
5. What happens to the baseline when the gain is realised?

Question five is the one that decides whether a gainshare is worth being in.

If the baseline resets to the improved level each period, you are on a treadmill. Every gain you make raises the bar you are measured against, so the same effort yields less each cycle, and eventually nothing. This is called baseline ratcheting and it is the single most common way gainshare schemes quietly die.

A well-designed scheme either holds the baseline fixed for a stated term — three to five years is typical — or ratchets on a published, gradual schedule that everyone can see coming. Find out which yours does. If nobody can tell you, that is the finding, and it is the most valuable thing you will produce this month.

Exercise 1.2 — The five places, from where you sit (one week)

You can see things the executive cannot. The five-place sweep from the chapter, translated to the floor:

Write five. You are looking for the one where you can see a gain that has not been counted, because an uncounted gain is not shared — and making it countable is the highest-leverage thing you can do inside a gainshare.

Exercise 1.3 — The appreciative team conversation (45 minutes)

Run this with your team. The wording matters:

"Think of a time here when something went unusually well. Not the biggest win — the one that surprised you. What were the conditions? What did we do that we do not normally do?"

Take notes on conditions, not outcomes. What you are assembling is a list of repeatable causes, which is exactly what a gainshare pays for.

---

PART TWO — THE ARITHMETIC

Days 31–45: compute what you are owed

Exercise 2.1 — Your share, calculated (90 minutes)

Do the arithmetic yourself. Do not wait to be told.

  verified improvement  =  current period measure  −  baseline
  pool                  =  verified improvement  ×  share %
  your line             =  pool  ×  your allocation basis

Then check three things people rarely check:

• Is the improvement net of the cost of achieving it? It should be. A scheme that shares gross improvement while the firm absorbs the cost will not survive contact with a finance function, and a scheme that dies has paid you nothing.
• What is the allocation basis? Headcount, hours, salary-weighted, or team-assessed. Each is defensible; each produces a different answer; you should know which one you are on.
• Is there a cap, a floor, or a carry-forward? A floor protects you in a bad period. A carry-forward means a period that misses can be recovered by the next. Both are good design. Their absence is worth asking about.

Exercise 2.2 — Your own crossover (45 minutes)

The chapter's crossover arithmetic is directly about you.

Many improvements worth making cost effort now and pay later. Under a short-period gainshare, an improvement that takes eighteen months to show is one you are paid nothing for during the eighteen months.

Compute it:

  n  =  ln(1 / (1 − penalty))  /  ln((1 + g) / (1 − d))

Worked from the chapter: a 25 percent starting penalty, 2.5 percent compounding against a 4 percent decline, crosses in year five.

Now the question that matters: does your scheme's period let you be paid for a year-five improvement? If the measurement period is twelve months with a resetting baseline, the honest answer is no — and the rational response of every person in the scheme is to make only improvements that show inside twelve months.

That is not cynicism. It is the mechanism working exactly as designed, and it is the most important thing you can raise, because it is a design problem with a known fix: a long-cycle pool, a fixed baseline term, or a carry-forward.

Exercise 2.3 — The honest negative (30 minutes)

Write the strongest case against your own scheme. Really write it.

Common honest negatives, any of which may apply:

• Gains from capital investment the firm funded are being shared as though they were operational improvement. That is not sustainable and everyone knows it.
• The measure is gameable, and someone is gaming it.
• The share is set at a level that does not change anyone's behaviour, so the scheme costs money and buys nothing.
• Improvement has been achieved by deferring maintenance — drawing down a stock and reporting it as a gain. This is the exact error the chapter names, and in a gainshare it is being paid for.

Bringing one of these forward yourself, with the arithmetic, is the single fastest way to be taken seriously by the people who run the scheme.

---

PART THREE — DESIGN

Days 46–70: make the uncounted countable

Exercise 3.1 — Build the baseline nobody built (2 weeks)

Take the uncounted gain you found in Exercise 1.2 and give it a baseline. This is the whole play.

1. The metric. Precise enough that two people compute it identically.
2. The period. Four weeks minimum; longer if your work is seasonal.
3. The method. How and when it is recorded, and by whom.
4. The verifier. Named. Your supervisor, or whoever verifies the existing scheme.
5. Two signatures. Yours and theirs.

Then change nothing for four weeks. Measuring before intervening feels like lost time. It is the foundation of every claim you will make afterwards.

Exercise 3.2 — The proposal (one page)

Once you have four weeks of baseline, write one page:

• What is currently uncounted, and what it is worth on your figures.
• The baseline, signed, attached.
• What you propose to change.
• How it would be measured and verified.
• What share you propose, and why that number.

The last line is the one people leave out, and leaving it out is a mistake. A proposal that names its own number is a negotiation. One that does not is a request.

Exercise 3.3 — Read the reversion (1 hour)

The chapter's facility gives 100 percent of savings back to the operating unit once the facility is repaid. Ask whether your scheme has an equivalent — a point at which the share improves because the investment has been recovered.

If it does not, that is a reasonable thing to propose, and the argument is already made in the chapter: it costs the firm nothing after repayment and it converts a reluctant participant into a genuine one. You are not asking for generosity. You are pointing at a structure that is cheaper for the firm than the alternative of people not caring.

---

PART FOUR — DESTINY AND DELIGHT

Days 71–90: make it hold

Exercise 4.1 — Into the standing review (one conversation)

Get your metric onto whatever is reviewed every month. Anything reviewed monthly persists; anything reviewed by exception disappears. This is usually a five-minute ask that nobody makes.

Exercise 4.2 — The second owner (this month)

One other person who understands the measure well enough to defend it if you are away, and who gets public credit for the first result. One person is a hobby. Two is a practice.

Exercise 4.3 — The written record (ongoing, 10 minutes a week)

Keep a dated log: what changed, when, what the number did. Ten minutes a week.

When the scheme is reviewed — and it will be — the person with a dated contemporaneous record is believed and everybody else is negotiating from memory. This is the highest return-on-effort activity in this entire workbook.

Exercise 4.4 — Delight, honestly (ongoing)

The chapter says delight is the adoption mechanism, not the reward, and in a gainshare that has a specific meaning: if the only good thing about the scheme is the payment, the scheme is fragile. Payments vary. Periods disappoint.

What makes a gainshare durable is that people can see the connection between what they did and what came back — the legibility itself is the satisfaction. Ask your team directly: can you point to the line where what we did shows up? If they cannot, the scheme is not yet delivering its main benefit, whatever it is paying.

---

KNOW YOUR SCHEME — A CHECKLIST

Work through this once. Keep the answers.

Any blank row is a question worth asking, and asking it in this form — calmly, in writing, as a request for clarity rather than a challenge — is how a scheme gets better without anyone losing face.

---

THE CONVERSATION, SCRIPTED

When you take a proposal to whoever runs the scheme, the order matters. It is the same order the chapter gives the executive: number, then story, then philosophy — and the philosophy is optional.

"I've been measuring something we don't currently count. Here's a four-week baseline, signed. On these figures it's worth about £X a year. I think we can improve it by Y, and I'd like to propose how it's measured and what share of it comes back to the team. It's one page — can I leave it with you?"

That is the whole conversation. Note what it does not contain: no grievance, no comparison to another employer, no argument about fairness in the abstract.

You are arriving with a baseline, a number and a proposal, which is exactly what the executive in the parallel workbook is being taught to arrive with. That is not a coincidence. It is the point of the whole volume — the practitioner and the corporation are not operating different economics, only different vocabularies.

---

APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR TEAM

1. Think of a period when the gainshare paid well. What did we actually do differently, and could we do it deliberately?
2. What do we do here that visibly creates value and is not counted anywhere?
3. Which improvement have we not attempted because it would take too long to show up in the measure?
4. What would we try if the baseline were fixed for five years?
5. Who outside this team can see our contribution most clearly, and have we ever asked them to describe it?
6. If every person here could point to the line where their work shows up, what would change about how we work?
7. What is the smallest thing we could start measuring this month that we would be glad to have three years of data on?
8. What would have to be true for this scheme to still be worth being in when everyone currently here has moved on?
9. Where might we be improving the number by drawing down something we will need later — and how would we know?
10. If we could change one clause in the scheme, which clause, and what would we offer in exchange?
11. What is already working about how we share gains here, and what makes it work?
12. What is the first sign we would see if trust in this scheme were quietly failing, and who would notice first?