Work Matters

Tag: peter principle

  • Ig Nobel Prize Winner: If The Peter Principle is Right, Then Organizations Should Randomly Promote People

    The Ig Nobel Prize is given out by a group called Improbable Research, which celebrates "achievements that first make people laugh,
    and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate
    the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science,
    medicine, and technology."  The 2010 awards were handed out on September 30th, and one one of the doctoral students I work with, Isaac Waisberg, pointed out that one of the prizes was awarded to a simulation that demonstrated — if the Peter Principle is true — organizations would be better off promoting employees randomly rather than promoting people until they they reach their level of incompetence.  Isaac knew I was interested in The Peter Principle as I wrote the foreword to the 40th Anniversary edition. Here is a link to the PDF of the article and here is the abstract:

    The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study

    Authors:
    Alessandro Pluchino,
    Andrea Rapisarda,
    Cesare Garofalo

    In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced an
    apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be
    summarized as follows: {\it 'Every new member in a hierarchical organization
    climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum
    incompetence'}. Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would
    realistically act in any organization where the mechanism of promotion rewards
    the best members and where the mechanism at their new level in the hierarchical
    structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level,
    usually because the tasks of the levels are very different to each other. Here
    we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features
    actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical
    structure, then not only is the Peter principle unavoidable, but also it yields
    in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization.
    Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies
    and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best
    ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote
    each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst
    members in terms of compete    nce    .

    This is just a simulation, not an empirical test. But the virtues of randomness are also found in an earlier experiment that showed groups that randomly selected leaders performed better than those that were asked to selected a leader from among their peers.  Here is the summary I wrote in Weird Ideas That Work:

    Further evidence for the virtues of
    making random decisions comes from a pair of experiments in Australia by S.
    Alexander Haslam and his colleagues. Their experiments compared the performance of
    small problem solving groups (3 to 5 people) that were asked to select their
    own leaders with groups that were randomly assigned a leader (i.e., a person
    whose name appeared either first or last in the alphabet).  These experiments involved 91 groups that
    worked on one of three closely related group decision-making exercises, the
    “winter survival task,” the “desert survival task,” or the “fallout survival
    task.”  Each of these small groups of
    college students developed a strategy for ranking potentially useful items for
    the particular task,  and their decisions
    were scored relative to expert ratings. 
    Both experiments showed that groups
    that had randomly assigned leaders performed significantly better than those
    that had selected their own leaders    . 
    Random assignment was shown to be superior to groups that had used
    either an informal  process where they
    selected leaders by “whatever means you see fit” or a formal process where each
    group member completed 10 self-report questions on a leadership skills
    inventory that had been shown to predict managerial success in prior
    studies.  Leaders who scored the highest
    on the inventory were assigned to lead groups that used the formal process.
    There were no significant differences between groups that used an informal or a
    formal process.  Both had inferior
    performance to groups with randomly selected leaders. 

    Haslam and his colleagues believe that
    the process of selecting a leader in these experiments focused attention on
    differences between group members, which undermined the group’s sense of shared
    identity and purpose, which in turn, undermined performance.  Instead of thinking about how to solve the
    problem together, or having a “united we stand, divided we fall” mentality,
    they thought about differences between them that were unrelated to the task —
    like who had more prestige in the group and why.  My interpretation is similar.  I would add that the leaders who are given a
    mandate to be in charge of a group often – without realizing – start imposing
    their individual will too strongly, which can stifle the range of ideas that
    are seriously considered by the group. 
    The researchers admit that they have suggested only one possible
    explanation for these findings, and acknowledge that a random process of
    selecting a leader is probably inferior to a systematic process for groups that
    do other tasks.  But these findings are
    intriguing because they force many of us – both practitioners and researchers
    –  to see an old problem in a new way,
    they spark the “vu ja de” mentality. 
    They suggest our     assumptions about how to select
    a leader may, at least at times, be flawed.

    I am not arguing that we ought to give-up and start selecting and promoting leaders randomly.  But it is interesting to consider randomness because doing so challenges our assumptions about the rationality of what we do in life  Indeed, speaking of randomness, last year I heard that Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman (he won the real prize, not to Ig) was running a simulation that seemed to show that if the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were randomly reassigned to different companies, there would be no significant impact on firm performance.  I don't know what happened to that research, or even how accurate that rumor is, all I can find is this WSJ article where he chimes in on the subject.  If anyone knows more, please comment.

    P.S. The reference for the experiment is
    Haslam, S. A, C. McGarty, R. A. Eggins, 
    B. E. Morrison, & K. J. Reynolds, “Inspecting the Emperor’s Clothes:
    Evidence that Randomly Selected Leaders can Enhance Group Performance”,      Group
    Dynamics: Theory, Process and Research     2 (1998): 168-18

    P.P.S. For another post on randomness, check out this one about decision-making among the Nasakpai Indians.

  • The Tension Between Getting it Done and Getting it Right

    I just went for a rather lovely long bike ride in the rain and was in a contemplative mood because I seem to be just a couple days from finishing my next book (I will tell you much more about it in a couple weeks when the powers that be agree with me that it is done).  When I got back, I had received an email from Randall who gave me feedback that, in my foreword to 40th Anniversary edition of the The Peter Principle:

    "I am disappointed that your forward did not mention
    what I believe to be the core insight in the book.  Without this
    particular insight, the rest of the book would have been nonsense:
     Competence is defined by your boss, who may or may not be competent
    themselves.  In particular, I have found the observation that competent
    bosses value output and incompetent bosses value input to be immutable.    " 

    As I thought about Randall's feedback, my reaction was that, although I do not see this as a fatal flaw (you never can put everything that people think is important in anything, or you end-up with something like Microsoft Word), that the forward would have been stronger if I had mentioned his point.

    Then,I went to look to see if there were any comments on my last post on "Leaders get the behavior that they display and tolerate," and there was more thoughtful feedback about how I might written something better, this time a suggestion that I remove the opening and reword the post.  And, again, I found the feedback useful and agree with Recruiting Animal that his apporach would have probably been better.

    This led me to start worrying about my book. I fretted, what if after about 18 months of working on it nearly every day and rewriting it over and over, having the hell edited of it, and getting feedback from people I trust,  I still  left something major out of it — or have sentences and paragraphs that still suck?  Then, calm washed over me when I remembered what my (now 91 year-old) dissertation adviser Bob Kahn told me some 30 years ago. Bob warned that my entire career, I would always have to deal with the tension between getting things right and getting things done.  That if I was too quick and sloppy, people would find my work useless and tiresome.  But if I was too much of a perfectionist, I wouldn't get very much done. 

    Walking this tightrope is never easy.  I guess I apply standards that vary depending on whether it is a blog post (this one will take about 20 minutes, I will proof it once, and no doubt, it will be as imperfect as the last one), a foreword or article (I worked on the first draft for the Peter Principle for perhaps two weeks, and then perhaps another day or two in response to editing), or a book (as I said, my current one will take a good 18 months and I have written books that took as long as 4 years and I have started at least three books that I never finished). 

    I know that I will always struggle to get this balance right yet but never will.  I also know that no matter how hard I try to make things perfect, there will always be flaws, there will always be things I wish I could go back and change, and there will always be people I can't please no matter how hard I try.  That is every author's lot in life, as well as anyone else who does creative work — from programming, to product design, to management consulting, to playing and writing music, to architecture, to hair styling, to leadership, to scientific experiments.

    I know that a lot of readers of this blog do creative work. I wonder, how do you strike this balance?  How do you decide when  it is time to toss your ideas out out into the world?

    P.S. I also want to take this chance to thank Randall and the Recruiting Animal for the comments, they were both very thoughtful. Please, anyone and everyone, don't hesitate to let me know when you have ideas about things I could have done better — and to Nicolay to catching my "forward" error.