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WORKBOOK — THE LUMINOUS GAINSHARE EMPLOYEE

Chapter I.10 · Scaling Without Losing the Thing

For the person working inside a gainshare arrangement while the business grows. Growth is the single most common way a gainshare quietly stops paying, and almost none of the ways it happens are anybody's bad intention. They are arithmetic, and arithmetic can be read in advance.

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WHY GROWTH IS THE TEST OF A GAINSHARE

A gainshare has four parts: a baseline, a measure, a share, and a period with a verifier. All four are stable while the business is one unit. Every one of them moves when the business becomes many.

None of that is malice. It is what happens when a scheme designed for one place is asked to run in forty. Your job is to see each of the four coming and to ask for the specific clause that handles it, before the growth rather than after.

You are also, and this is the part worth holding onto, one of the few people in the business who can see fidelity directly. The executive has audit scores. You have the actual work. That makes you the highest-quality measurement instrument in the organisation, and it is worth being paid for.

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PART ONE — DISCOVERY

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

Exercise 1.1 — Locate yourself on the hop map (2 hours)

Answer in writing:

1. Who taught this unit how to do the thing? Who taught them?
2. How many hops are you from whoever actually worked it out?
3. What arrived at your unit with a reason attached, and what arrived as a rule nobody here can explain?

Question three is the finding. A rule with no reason attached is a piece of the practice that lost its fidelity somewhere between the source and you, and it is almost always the thing that causes the most friction and the least value.

Write down three of them. You will use them in Part Three.

Exercise 1.2 — Read your scheme for the growth clauses (2 hours)

Take the scheme document and find the answer to each of these. If it is not there, that absence is the answer.

Output. Five answers, or five noted absences. The absences are the most valuable thing you will produce this month, because they can still be written in while the scheme is being extended, and they cannot be written in afterwards.

Exercise 1.3 — The appreciative team conversation (45 minutes)

Run this with your team, in these words:

"Think of something we do here that people at other sites don't do, or don't do the same way. Not a complaint — a thing we're good at. Where did it come from, and who here would somebody need to talk to in order to learn it?"

Take notes on the person, not the process. You are locating the source inside your own unit, and that person is about to become commercially important to the whole network.

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PART TWO — THE ARITHMETIC

Days 31–45: compute what growth does to your share

Exercise 2.1 — The dilution calculation (1 hour)

Work your own numbers.

  unit improvement this period                      £ ______
  central recharge deducted first                   £ ______
  regional or group share taken before yours        £ ______
  net pool                                          £ ______
  your scheme share            _____ %              £ ______
  divided by headcount in the pool       ______     £ ______ per person

Now run it twice more: once as it was two years ago, once as it will be if the network doubles and the recharge scales with it. Three numbers on one line is an argument. One number is a feeling.

Exercise 2.2 — The ratchet test (30 minutes)

If the baseline resets to the improved level each period, compute what a constant effort earns you over five cycles:

  cycle 1  improvement 100, you share 100
  cycle 2  baseline now includes it; the same effort improves 100 again
           but from a higher base — in most schemes it earns less
  cycle 5  the same effort earns a fraction of cycle 1

Write the number. Then find out, in writing, which of these your scheme does: fixed baseline for a stated term (three to five years is typical), a published gradual ratchet, or an unpublished reset. If nobody can tell you, that is the finding, and it is worth more than this quarter's payment.

Exercise 2.3 — Price your own fidelity (one week)

This is the exercise that converts the whole chapter into money.

Fidelity decays at φ per teaching hop. At a generous φ = 0.90, a network holds roughly three hops before a unit drops below a 0.70 floor. Every unit beyond the floor is a unit that costs the business rather than earning for it.

So: what is a source-week worth? If you or someone on your team is close enough to the source to train properly, and a week of your time restores a distant unit's fidelity from 0.66 to 0.90, then the value of that week is the difference between that unit's output at the two levels.

  distant unit annual contribution at full fidelity      £ ______
  its contribution at its current fidelity               £ ______
  the gap                                                £ ______
  the cost of one source-week from your team             £ ______

In most real cases the gap is an order of magnitude larger than the week. That ratio is what you take into the conversation, and it is not a request for recognition. It is a costed proposal about network margin.

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PART THREE — DESIGN

Days 46–70: make the uncounted countable

Exercise 3.1 — Write the three clauses (one week)

Growth-proofing a gainshare takes three sentences, and they are much easier to get before the network expands than after.

Unit baseline. Improvement is measured against this unit's own baseline, fixed for a stated term of ___ years, not against a network average.

Gross before recharge. The gainshare pool is computed on gross verified improvement, before central or regional recharges.

Transmission is counted. Time spent by members of this unit training or restoring other units counts as verified improvement to the network, and is included in this unit's pool at the measured value of the restored output.

The third one is the one nobody has. It is also the one that converts the chapter into a mechanism: it makes fidelity a shared asset that the people closest to it are paid to maintain. Without it, training another unit is a cost to you and a benefit to everyone else, and rational people stop doing it — which is exactly how a network's φ falls without a single bad decision being made.

Exercise 3.2 — Build the fidelity measure (two weeks)

Measurement you build yourself is measurement that counts what you actually do. Propose a simple one and offer to run it:

• Pick the three rules-with-no-reason from Exercise 1.1.
• For each, write what the reason is — go and find out from the source if you have to.
• Score your unit and one other on whether the reason, not just the rule, is present.

That is a fidelity instrument. It took a fortnight, it costs nothing, and it is the only one in the business that measures whether the reason travelled. Offer it to whoever owns quality. Ask for it to be a counted output.

Exercise 3.3 — Name the organ (1 hour)

What does your unit do separately that every unit does separately and would rather do once? Write it in one sentence with a rough annual cost. This is the portable organ from the chapter, and the person on the floor usually knows what it is long before the centre does.

Take it to your manager as a saving, not as a request.

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PART FOUR — DESTINY AND DELIGHT

Days 71–90: make it hold

Exercise 4.1 — Get it into the standing pack (one cycle)

Anything reviewed monthly persists; anything reviewed by exception does not. Get one of your numbers — the fidelity score, the source-week value, the dilution line — onto the standing reporting pack. One number, every month, with your unit's name on it.

Exercise 4.2 — Recruit the second owner (one conversation)

One person running a measure is a hobby. Two is a practice. Recruit the second person by giving them the credit for the first result, and recruit them from a different unit than yours, because a measure that exists in two units is a network measure and a measure that exists in one is a local eccentricity.

Exercise 4.3 — Take the week (one week)

Go and spend a week in a distant unit doing the work alongside them. Not inspecting — working. Write 400 words afterwards on what was unmistakably the thing and what had drifted, and be specific about the drift.

This is the highest-value week of your year, and it is measurable: you now have the before, and the unit now has a person they can ring.

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HOW THE LEDGER WORKS ACROSS A GROWING NETWORK

A one-site gainshare needs one ledger. A network needs three, and knowing which is which is most of what protects you.

The unit ledger. Your baseline, your measure, your improvement, your pool. This is the one you can audit yourself, and it is the only one where you can check every line. Keep your own copy each period; a ledger you cannot reconstruct is a ledger somebody else owns.

The network ledger. Improvement that exists only because units are connected: the procurement delta, the shared platform, the risk pooled. It is real and it is worth sharing, but note the asymmetry — it saturates. Past about a dozen units most of it is already captured, so a network ledger that keeps growing while member count grows is usually recording recharges, not gains. Ask which.

The transmission ledger. The one almost nobody keeps. What was restored, by whom, in which unit, and what it was worth. Without it, every hour spent teaching another unit is a cost in your ledger and a benefit in theirs, and the arithmetic quietly instructs the best people in the network to stop teaching.

Ask for all three to be reported, and ask for the third by name. A scheme that reports only the first tells you nothing about whether the network is worth being in; a scheme that reports only the second is asking you to fund a centre on trust.

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KNOW YOUR SCHEME — A CHECKLIST

Tick what you can evidence in writing. Every blank is a conversation.

• The baseline is my unit's own, and I know its date
• I know whether it ratchets, and on what published schedule
• I know whether the pool is gross or net of central recharges
• I know every layer that takes a share before mine, and their percentages
• I know who verifies, and whether they have stood in this unit
• Training and transmission time counts as measured improvement
• I can compute my own share from the scheme document without asking anyone
• I know what happens to all of the above if the network doubles

The last one is the one this chapter adds. Everything above it is a normal gainshare question. The last is the growth question, and it is the one that decides whether the scheme is still worth anything in three years.

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THE CONVERSATION, SCRIPTED

For the meeting where you ask for the transmission clause.

"We're opening sites faster than we're training them, and I can show you what that costs. Site ___ is three hops from where this was worked out. On our own audit data the decrement per hop is about ___ percent, which puts it at about ___ percent of full. At its run rate that gap is roughly £___ a year.

A week of my time restores most of it. I've done it once — here's the before-and-after.

What I'd like is for that week to count. Not as goodwill: as measured improvement to the network, in our pool, at the value of the output restored. That way the people who can transmit this have a reason to keep doing it, and the number goes on the pack so you can see whether it's working.

If the arithmetic doesn't hold, I'd rather find that out from the data than argue about it."

Three things that script does. It leads with the network's money rather than yours. It offers a measurement rather than a claim. And it makes the request falsifiable, which is the fastest way to be taken seriously by anyone who has been asked for things before.

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APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR TEAM

1. What do we do here that another site would want, and who would they need to talk to in order to learn it?
2. When has someone from another unit come here and made something better — what did they do, and what would it take to have more of that?
3. Which rule do we follow whose reason nobody here can explain, and who would know it?
4. If transmission were counted in our pool, what would we volunteer for tomorrow?