One major point of the insight you gave me1 is that group participation is enforced by the repeated participation in the exchanges of the memetic system2. If the act of participation in the memetic system by the employees results in the accomplishment of your objectives, then you "win". You have to design a system of rewards in which the "work" is part of it, or in which the "work" elements are "wrapped" in memetic elements which resonate and produce memetic rewards for all concerned (see non-compliance below). You also have to think in terms of "packing the meme-space"5. As I have learned from my experiments however, and to quote I believe it was Abraham Lincoln, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." By the same token, a majority of people will take to a well-designed and appropriate memetic system (memeplex), but there will always be non-compliers.
There are a couple of forms of non-compliance3
1. rebellion4
2. apathy
Oddly enough, I think #1 is by far and away the easiest to deal with. You simply design a sub-system for the rebels to fit into. LET there be a non-blue doughnut table, or some other treat, or whatever. People feel like they are rebelling, but they are really conforming just as much as anybody else. You aren't a "Democrat" as much as a "Non-Republican" and vice-versa. I call this "memetic polarization" -- you are in the system, just at one end or the other. A good memetic engineer will think of this beforehand and try to design something ahead of time, or at least be prepared to adapt as more data roll in.
I have not figured out much about the apathy bit yet. I think that genius, insanity, pathological social alienation, and apathy are all related, memetically speaking. I'm still working on that one. More later...
When it comes to apathy, you may just be back to the draconian, clock-punching, micro-managing nightmare that most organization are from top to bottom anyway. Even if you can liberate a small percentage of the population (cohort) from that state of apathy, it's a huge win, and since a fundamental property of memeplex participation is self-motivation and self-regulation, it should be possible with the right memetic designing to enlist memeplex participants in the task of "managing" and reporting on the resigned drudge population6 (and I have already described to you examples of how this might be done).
Anyway, for starters....
1"no thanks" is fine because there is a memetic/karmic contract which is concluded in full and enforced by socio-memetic "bullying" (the beauty of which is that neither I nor anybody else has to do anything about!! This is the attractive bit for managers!)
2for example, submitting the prime numbers and ideas, wearing the blue shirts, and tangentially, eating the doughnuts and pizza. If this is perceived as a "good deal" by the participant, i.e., there is residual memetic/karmic reward, then he continues to participate. Whereas if he feels "forced" to do so, or "cheated" by the exchange, then if he has a choice later, he does not choose to participate again.
2 and this may be a complete list
4deliberately wearing non-blue shirt, bringing non-blue-shirt doughnuts, sitting down at stand-up meetings (ha, ha)
5 creating a bunch of memes and meme sub-systems (memeplexes) which don't actually "do" anything, but which prevent "useless" memes from invading and reënforcing the rest of the system, e.g., cute logos, songs and jokes about the project, special snack and food days, rewards for stupid trivial project-related (and other) "accomplishments" (most uses of the word 'notwithstanding' in comments), etc.
6 Or even those who participate in the system to a lesser (or greater) degree. Layering is all part of the design process. "Promotion" becomes a process of participation in more and more advanced memetic interactions with a different (smaller) cohort involved in more specific task-sets, e.g., managing, testing, development, marketing, etc.
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