The symptom
Organisations using Dubai as a regional base — for the wider UAE, GCC or broader Middle East footprint — frequently report a specific, uncomfortable pattern: individual market or country targets are being met, sometimes exceeded, while something less measurable about the organisation — how consistently a client or customer experience is delivered across those markets — is visibly slipping. The ambition metrics look healthy. The consistency does not.
What leaders usually conclude — and what the evidence suggests instead
The common conclusion is that individual country teams are simply executing unevenly, and that the fix is tighter oversight or more standardised training. Steven Kerr’s classic 1975 analysis, “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B,” suggests the more precise diagnosis lies elsewhere. Kerr’s research — drawn from manufacturing, insurance, and settings as varied as politics and medicine — found a consistent pattern: organisations that measure and reward one thing (in this case, market-level growth targets) while stating that they value something else (consistency, brand integrity, service standard) should not be surprised when behaviour follows the measured target rather than the stated hope. As Kerr put it, people “seek information concerning what activities are rewarded, and then seek to do… those things, often to the virtual exclusion of activities not rewarded.”
V. F. Ridgway’s earlier research on performance measurement adds the mechanism. Ridgway found that single, multiple and composite performance measures can all produce undesirable consequences for overall performance when they are relied on without understanding their full effects. A regional growth target, measured market by market, is a single clear measure that a country lead can act on directly. Consistency, by contrast, is diffuse, harder to attribute to any one decision-maker, and — in most regional organisations — not formally measured at all. Ridgway’s argument predicts exactly this outcome: the measured target gets optimised; the unmeasured, harder-to-attribute quality erodes without anyone having clearly decided to let it.
The causal mechanism is worth stating precisely, because it explains why well-intentioned leadership often does not catch this early. A market lead facing a growth target does not choose to deprioritise consistency; consistency is simply not the variable they are being asked to report on, so it does not enter their decision-making at the point where trade-offs are actually made. Multiply this across several market leads, each independently making locally reasonable trade-offs against the one thing they are measured on, and the aggregate consistency of the organisation degrades as a side effect of individually rational local decisions — not because of any single decision that, viewed in isolation, looks like a consistency failure.
What it looks like in practice
In practice, this shows up as country or market leads making locally sensible decisions — adapting an offering, a process, or a service standard to fit local conditions or accelerate a local target — that are individually reasonable and collectively erosive. No single decision looks like a consistency failure from where it was made; the erosion is visible only in aggregate, which is precisely why it tends to surface late, and often first to customers or clients operating across multiple markets rather than to internal leadership.
This pattern is intensified in a genuinely multi-market regional hub structure, where “the region” spans jurisdictions with real differences in regulation, customer expectation and competitive intensity — UAE, Saudi Arabia, and other GCC and wider Middle East markets each have distinct conditions that make some local adaptation genuinely necessary, not merely convenient. That legitimate need for adaptation makes it harder to distinguish reasonable local variation from consistency drift, because both look, from a single market’s perspective, like sensible responses to local conditions.
A common misconception is that the answer is to eliminate local adaptation altogether in favour of rigid standardisation. Neither Kerr nor Ridgway’s research supports that conclusion. Kerr’s point is about alignment between what is measured and what is valued, not about eliminating local judgement; Ridgway’s point is about the danger of undue confidence in any single measure, which applies equally to an organisation that swings to over-standardising and measuring uniformity as the sole target. The more precise implication is that if consistency is genuinely valued, it needs to be made visible and attributable in something like the way growth targets already are — not that local variation itself is the problem.
The consequence of leaving this unaddressed compounds specifically for organisations serving clients or customers who themselves operate across the same regional footprint. A client engaging with the organisation in one Gulf market and expecting a comparable experience in another is precisely the audience most likely to notice consistency drift before internal leadership does, because they are the one party actually experiencing the organisation across markets rather than within a single one. By the time that feedback reaches leadership — often through a lost account or a complaint that seems, from a single market’s perspective, disproportionate to the specific decision that triggered it — the underlying pattern has usually been building for some time across multiple markets simultaneously.
Where this shows up
Written for organisations in Dubai. See the Dubai market page for related reading, or browse the other hubs on the Markets page.
Questions worth considering
- What is currently measured and rewarded at the country or market level, and does it include anything that represents consistency, or only growth?
- Which recent local adaptations were genuinely necessary for local conditions, and which were reasonable-looking decisions that collectively eroded something the organisation says it values?
- Who would notice consistency drift first — and is that person positioned to say so before it becomes visible to customers operating across markets?
- Has feedback from a cross-market client or customer ever been dismissed as market-specific when it may have reflected a broader pattern?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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