La Bourse / Volume VI / Nº VI.05 / Workbook — the Gainshare employee

A woman seated on the floor of a long white room reading, a cup and a teapot beside her, candles lit. — Plate VI.05 · Workbook — the Gainshare employeeSix Years of Paper.Every collapse in this chapter was measured before it happened, written down, and published. The interval between the writing and the falling is the only number here that generalises.

WORKBOOK — THE LUMINOUS GAINSHARE EMPLOYEE

Chapter VI.05 · The Commons That Fell

For the person working inside a gainshare arrangement — where a defined share of verified improvement returns to the people who created it. This chapter is about commons that fell; your scheme is a commons, you are an appropriator in it, and the four failures in the chapter are the four ways a gainshare dies.

YOUR SCHEME IS A COMMONS. READ IT AS ONE.

A gainshare has four written parts: a baseline, a measure, a share, and a period with a verifier. Chapter I.01 sets those out. This chapter adds the thing nobody tells you at induction:

Those four parts are exactly the four parts of a common-pool resource institution, and they fail in exactly the same order.

Gainshare part	Ostrom's principle	How it dies
Baseline	1 · clear boundaries	Ratchets, or is redrawn after the fact
Measure	4 · monitoring	Rises while the thing it stands for falls
Share	3 · collective choice	Set by people who are not in the pool
Verifier	6 · conflict resolution	Is the same body that pays the claim

Everything in this workbook follows from that table. And the appreciative part first, because it is the true part: if you are in a real gainshare, you are inside one of the better-designed commons in commercial life. Somebody wrote down a rule that binds the firm to share, and wrote it before knowing what the number would be. That is rarer than it sounds and it is worth defending precisely.

PART ONE — DISCOVERY

Weeks 1–4: find what is holding in your scheme

Exercise 1.1 — The five questions, in writing (2 hours)

Take your scheme document and your last statement. Answer in writing:

What is the baseline, and what date was it set?
What is the measure, as a formula?
What is the share percentage, and is it of gross or net improvement?
Who verifies, and when?
What happens to the baseline when a gain is realised?

Question five decides everything. If the baseline resets to the improved level each period, you are on a treadmill: every gain raises the bar you are measured against, so the same effort yields less each cycle. That is baseline ratcheting, and in the language of this chapter it is a boundary that moves — Ostrom's first principle, failing silently, in your favour to begin with.

Exercise 1.2 — What has already held here (90 minutes, in conversation)

Ask three colleagues who have been in the scheme longest:

When did this scheme work best? Tell me about a specific period.
What was in place then that made it work?
What would you keep exactly as it is?

Do not ask what is wrong with it. Notice how much you learn anyway, and notice that what you learn arrives attached to a mechanism you could rebuild rather than to a grievance you can only carry.

Exercise 1.3 — Find the uncounted gain (a week of noticing)

Somewhere in your work is an improvement that is real and is not in the measure. Fewer callbacks. A rework rate that fell. A machine that stopped failing because somebody changed a habit. A handover that stopped losing information.

Write down three. For each, one line on how you would count it. You are not complaining that the measure is incomplete. You are producing the amendment, which is a different act, and it is the one that gets adopted.

PART TWO — THE ARITHMETIC

Weeks 5–8: compute your own lag

Exercise 2.1 — Your scheme's L (2 hours)

The chapter's instrument, applied to you:

    L  =  t(the term changes)  −  t(the first published number showing it would)

Find the last material change to your scheme — a share percentage, a baseline reset, a measure redefinition, a cap. Then find the earliest document in which the reasoning for it appears in public: a results pack, a restructuring announcement, a change of ownership, a margin trend in the annual report.

Count the months. That is your warning window, and it is the amount of notice you will get next time. In most schemes it is between one and three years and almost nobody has counted it.

Exercise 2.2 — Your scheme's R (2 hours)

Now the other number. From the date a problem with the scheme was formally raised by employees, to the date anything changed. Take the last three instances.

    R < L    you can act inside the warning
    R > L    the change lands before you can respond

If R > L, do not conclude the scheme is bad. Conclude that the amendment procedure is the thing to work on, not the share percentage — which is the most useful strategic insight available to anyone inside a scheme, and it is almost always missed because the share percentage is the number people argue about.

Exercise 2.3 — The lying instrument in your measure (2 hours)

Apply the chapter's test to your gainshare measure:

Under what circumstance does this rise while the thing it represents falls?

Worked examples that are real in gainshare schemes:

Output per hour rises when overtime is cut and the same work is compressed — the metric improves while conditions degrade.
Cost per unit falls when maintenance is deferred — the metric improves while a stock is drawn down. This is the cod's CPUE in a factory.
Quality escape rate falls when inspection is reduced.
Safety incidents fall when reporting falls.

Every one of these is the same structure: a numerator that improves because a denominator was quietly re-engineered. Find yours and write it down. Bring it to the scheme committee as a proposal to add a companion metric, not as an accusation. A companion metric is easy to say yes to.

Exercise 2.5 — The geometry your scheme is in (1 hour)

The chapter names three shapes of delay, and a gainshare can be in any of them. Work out which one you are in, because it decides what watching is worth.

Exponential — your scheme is tied to a stock that is being run down: maintenance deferred, a skill base thinning, a customer relationship being harvested. The gain is real now and each year of not correcting costs more than the last. Watching helps, and early action helps far more.
Linear — a fixed entitlement being drawn at a steady rate. Nothing will surprise you. The work is arithmetic and patience.
Step — the scheme's terms sit entirely in somebody else's gift. Nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens, and then the terms change on a date you did not pick. Watching is nearly worthless here. A written notice period is the only thing that converts a step into a slope, which is why it is the first clause to ask for and the cheapest one to grant.

Write one sentence naming your geometry and one naming the clause that would change it. That pair of sentences is the whole of your negotiating position, and it fits on a compliments slip.

Exercise 2.4 — What the gain was worth, and to whom (3 hours)

Do the Reddit arithmetic on your own workplace. It is one line and it is legitimate:

    the improvement you produced, valued at the measure
    ------------------------------------------------------
    the improvement as it appears in the firm's own results

The chapter's version: volunteer moderation valued at a minimum-wage floor was 2.8 per cent of a platform's 2019 revenue and 0.42 per cent of its 2023 revenue — the commons' share of the thing it built fell 6.6-fold without a single rule being changed. Nobody did anything. The denominator grew and the numerator did not.

If your share percentage is fixed and the firm's revenue base has grown by acquisition, the same dilution has happened to you and it is invisible in the percentage. Compute it in money, not in percentage. Percentages are the instrument that lies here.

PART THREE — DESIGN

Weeks 9–12: make the uncounted countable and the terms amendable

Exercise 3.1 — Write the trigger you want (2 hours)

One page, in the scheme's own language:

The index. One number, already collected, that everyone accepts.
The line. A value, agreed now, while nobody is near it.
The step. What happens automatically when it is crossed — a review, a recalibration, a floor payment. Automatic. No meeting.
The measurer. Named, and not the same body that pays the claim. Internal audit is usually acceptable and usually free.
The notice period. Months of notice before any term changes. This is the single most valuable clause you can ask for, because it lengthens your L, and L is the one thing you normally cannot influence.

Exercise 3.2 — The amendment procedure (the real ask)

Ostrom's third principle, in one sentence you can put in a document:

Material changes to the baseline, the measure or the share take effect only after a stated notice period, and the employee representatives on the scheme committee may propose amendments that receive a written response within sixty days.

That is not co-determination and it is not a veto. It is a procedure, with a clock. A commons in which the appropriators cannot change the rules is a tenancy, and the difference between the two is a paragraph like that one.

Exercise 3.3 — Build the failure-order table for your scheme (3 hours)

Four rows from the table at the top of this workbook. For each: is it working, degraded or gone, and on what date did it change? Write UNKNOWN where you cannot find out, and note who would know.

A table with two dates and two unknowns is a working document. A table with four confident guesses is a grievance, and it will be read as one.

PART FOUR — DESTINY AND DELIGHT

Weeks 13–16: make it hold

It is in the standing pack. Get the scheme's headline number onto whatever document gets reviewed monthly. Anything reviewed monthly persists.

It has a second owner. One person asking is a complaint; two people with a document is a practice. Recruit by giving the credit for the first amendment away.

The verifier is independent. If the body that computes the gain also pays it, every ambiguity resolves the same way, and there will be ambiguities.

The notice period is written. Everything above fails without it, because without notice your R is irrelevant — the change is already in force.

The failure modes, so you see them coming.

The ratchet. The baseline resets, quietly, in a year when the number was good. Check it every cycle.
The redefinition. The measure is "clarified" in a way that removes a component you were producing. Keep your own copy of every scheme version with its date.
The dilution. A merger enlarges the denominator and your share of the enterprise falls without the percentage changing.
The suspension. A hard year suspends the scheme "for one period," and the suspension becomes the new baseline. This is the most common ending.

And the delight, which is not consolation. There is a particular pleasure in producing the amendment rather than the complaint — walking into a committee with a companion metric, a trigger, a notice clause and a table with honest unknowns in it, and watching the conversation change register in about thirty seconds. You stop being a person with a problem and become a person with a draft, and drafts get edited rather than dismissed.

The other pleasure is Sheridan County's, and it belongs to you too. Those irrigators voted to take a fifth of their own water away and quietly took a third, and the harvest did not notice. Most of what a system assumes a restriction will cost turns out to be slack nobody had costed. The same is true of most of what a firm assumes a fair share would cost it, and the only way anybody finds out is that somebody computes it.

KNOW YOUR SCHEME — A CHECKLIST

Tick what you can evidence in writing. Blanks are the work, not a verdict.

I have a dated copy of every version of the scheme document
I can state the baseline and its date
I can write the measure as a formula
I know whether the share is of gross or net improvement
I know what happens to the baseline when a gain is realised
I know who verifies, and whether they also pay
I have computed my scheme's L from a real change
I have computed my scheme's R from three real requests
I have named one circumstance in which my measure rises while the thing falls
I have computed the gain in money, not only in percentage
There is a written notice period before terms change
There is a written amendment procedure with a clock on the response

THE CONVERSATION, SCRIPTED

For the scheme committee. Six sentences, in this order.

"The scheme has worked best in the periods when the baseline was stable, and I want to protect that." — open on what holds.
"I have computed how long it takes us to respond to a raised issue: it is R months." — a measurement, not a feeling.
"I have computed how much notice we typically get before a term changes: it is L months." — the other side of the same instrument.
"Those two numbers are in the wrong order, so I have drafted a notice clause." — the finding arrives already carrying its fix.
"I have also drafted a companion metric, because our current measure can improve while [the named thing] gets worse." — the amendment, not the accusation.
"What would you change in these two drafts?" — hand them the pen. A rule they amended is a rule they will defend.

APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS FOR YOUR TEAM

When has this scheme felt most fair? What was in place then?
What improvement do we produce every week that the measure does not see, and how would we count it?
If we wrote next year's baseline ourselves, what would we set, and could we defend it to the finance function?
What notice would we need for a change to feel like a decision rather than something that happened to us?
Who outside this team would we trust to verify the number, and what would it take to ask them?