Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
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Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
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Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#2"Sorry John, we can't promote you. You're just too good at what you do."
It would have been far more interesting to investigate alternative structures for large organizations. And in terms of strict hierarchical systems, the omission of a consideration of the military is rather glaring.
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#3How about training people in the skills they will require for their new position?
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#4Society is hierarchcal. It is even more interesting to apply the suggested methods to pick a president in USA.
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#5Society is hierarchcal. It is even more interesting to apply the suggested methods to pick a president in USA.
In what way is society hierarchical?
Hierarchy is generally a poor way to organize things, unless you happen to need to fill space (which is how nature uses it). If you arrive at hierarchy as a solution to a problem, you have most likely misunderstood your problem.
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#6This is especially true in technology companies, where the people skills needed in managers are generally not those possessed by the most high performing leaf nodes (who may tend towards dweebery. You know who you are).
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#7This is about a (rather bad, I think) paper investigating a really extreme version of the Peter principle: what happens if competence at one level is totally uncorrelated with competence at the level below? In that situation, duh, it turns out that you want to promote the worst-performing people. (Because they'll do just as well after promotion as the best-performing people, by hypothesis, but promoting them out of the lower level makes things better at that level.)
The paper takes a purely empirical approach (simulate an organization with given performance characteristics and promotion rules, and see how well it does according to an ad hod measure), and it doesn't even seem that its authors have understood why it's obvious that under what they call the "Peter hypothesis" -- which is not in fact quite the hypothesis Laurence Peter made, and neither is their version of the Peter principle correct -- promoting the worst performers is best.
The paper also considers a "Common Sense Hypothesis", namely that competence at different levels is strongly correlated. Unsurprisingly, the authors find that promoting the best performers works then.
Of course, reality probably doesn't quite match either the overoptimistic "common sense hypothesis" or the overpessimistic "Peter hypothesis". The authors apparently think that a good way to deal with this is to ask what minimizes your worst-case losses if you know that one of those hypotheses holds but don't know which. So they recommend either promoting at random, or alternating between promoting the best performer and promoting the worst performer.
It might be interesting to do a study like theirs using more realistic models of employee performance at different levels of the hierarchy, but I don't see much value in what they've done.
(Let me speculate mischievously that the authors are probably quite good at what they mostly do for a living; perhaps the apparent lack of correlation between that and their success in investigating the Peter principle is itself evidence for their version of the "Peter hypothesis"...)
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#8thats the exact definition of the "Pewter Principle" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
Everyone are promoted to their level of incompetence.
If you are good at something, you'll get promoted until you are not that good anymore (i.e. its 'too big' for your skills)
in other workd (wikipedia): "anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails. "
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#9Society is hierarchcal. It is even more interesting to apply the suggested methods to pick a president in USA.
In what way is society hierarchical? Hierarchy is generally a poor way to organize things, unless you happen to need to fill space (which is how nature uses it). If you arrive at hierarchy as a solution to a problem, you have most likely misunderstood your problem.
I guess nature misunderstood the problem domain of organizing the body:
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way is society hierarchical? Hierarchy is generally a poor way to organize things, unless you happen to need to fill space (which is how nature uses it). If you arrive at hierarchy as a solution to a problem, you have most likely misunderstood your problem.
I guess nature misunderstood the problem domain of organizing the body: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/medo/Modularity.pdf
Which is a space-filling problem, mentioned above as how nature uses hierarchy.