The Cobra Effect: When Your Brilliant Idea Turns Around and Bites You

In colonial India, the British government faced a deadly problem - too many venomous cobras slithering around Delhi.

The fix seemed obvious—offer a bounty for every dead cobra brought in.

At first, it worked. People hunted cobras, collected their reward, and everyone congratulated themselves on a job well done.

Until… human creativity struck.

Some enterprising souls began breeding cobras. Why hunt for snakes in the wild when you can farm them in your backyard?

When the government eventually caught on and ended the bounty program, breeders released their now-worthless stock.

The result? Even more cobras than before the plan began.

And thus, the Cobra Effect was born—a masterclass in unintended consequences.

The Modern Corporate Cobra Farm

You’d think this was just a quirky colonial footnote. But spend enough time in boardrooms, and you’ll see cobras everywhere—only now they wear suits and carry KPIs.

We create well-meaning policies, incentives, and targets.

We announce them with great fanfare.

We watch the numbers improve… and then realize we’ve been gamed.

Here are just a few I’ve seen up close:

• Sales Targets That Encourage Sandbagging

Set aggressive quarterly goals and bonuses, and watch salespeople hold back deals until the next quarter to secure an easy win. The scoreboard looks neat, but actual growth limps along.

• Call Center KPIs That Kill Customer Experience

Measure success by call-handling time, and agents will rush customers off the phone or transfer them just to stop the clock. Efficiency soars—right up until churn rates spike.

• “Fail Fast” Programs That Breed Chaos

Encourage rapid experimentation without guardrails, and teams will flood the system with half-baked projects. The innovation funnel turns into a junk drawer.

• Software Adoption Targets That Inflate Usage Metrics

Push for log-ins and transactions, and employees will click through workflows they’ll never actually use—padding the stats while real adoption flatlines.

Why It Happens

The Cobra Effect isn’t about bad leadership. It’s about incomplete design.

We build incentives for the behavior we want to see—but forget to ask the most important question:

What’s the cleverest—and most counterproductive—way people could exploit this?

Because people will exploit it. Not out of malice, but because human beings are hardwired to take the shortest path to a reward—whether that’s closing a deal, hitting a metric, or collecting a cobra bounty.

Avoiding Your Own Cobra Crisis

Before you roll out your next grand plan, pressure-test it:

• Run a pre-mortem. Imagine it’s failed spectacularly. Ask: What went wrong? Who gamed it?

• Balance metrics with meaning. A KPI without context is a loophole waiting to happen.

• Reward the right behavior, not just the right number. Numbers are symptoms—behavior is the cause.

The Final Bite

Every leader loves a simple solution. But as the British in Delhi discovered, simple solutions can have very slithery side effects.

So before you hand out your next “bounty,” make sure you’re not just building a more efficient cobra farm.

Because in business—just like in colonial India—the easiest way to double your problem is to pay people to solve it.