The company that I work in starts giving you responsibilities from the next level without a promotion and you only get promoted if you have completed 1 year of performing the next level responsibilities _well_.
Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
11–20 of 26 posts
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranial_cavity
Glad we've finally cleared up the function of that space filling matter.
Aristotle asserted that the brain's function was to cool the blood. Later, it was asserted that it was responsible for cognitive facilities. And now, finally, we realize that its job is to fill the space in between one's ear ...
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#13This 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 t…
I think the basic problem has more to do with the inability to verify how competent someone is. In the real world I suspect the ability to fake competence is often what is promoted to the highest levels.
But, let's assume each level is independent on every other level and higher levels are also more important. Now how do you promote people? Well find a general measure of how good people are at anything let's call it "g" and then promote people based on that. You are probably thinking that's not fair. Which I think is the real reason people get promoted. If you dangle the possibility of promotion you get people to keep working for a lower immediate reward in the hopes that they will end up being promoted.
So promoting people based on competence at their current job might just be a carrot to keep people working hard for lower rewards.
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#14Society 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.
Most of organizations in our society have hierarchical structure. The goverment, military, academic, enterprise show you the hierarchical traits in position titles. The pyramid is necessary for managing responsibilities and decision making. Social stratification is normal to all societies to some extend.
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#15Earlier 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.
Most of organizations in our society have hierarchical structure. The goverment, military, academic, enterprise show you the hierarchical traits in position titles. The pyramid is necessary for managing responsibilities and decision making. Social stratification is normal to all societies to some extend.
But the hierarchy is broken by the ability of one node, err, person, to participate in multiple hierarchies at once at varying levels. This turns it into more of a graph of relationships with hierarchical elements, and while it's true you can't understand that without understanding hierarchies it is equally true that you can't understand the dynamics if you only characterize it as a hierarchy.
One way of expressing America's still-unusual social flexibility is that we have many valid social structures and it is very easy to move between them; there have even been some studies on how that works. Contrast this with the other extreme of "grow up in your home small town and never leave", for instance, where there does develop a fairly strict universal hierarchy.
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#16Could be due to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#17This 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 t…
[promote] the least competent individuals... and... promote individuals at random
Many people engaged in large organizations might argue that this is already how things work.
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#18This 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 t…
I think the basic problem has more to do with the inability to verify how competent someone is. In the real world I suspect the ability to fake competence is often what is promoted to the highest levels. But, let's assume each level is independent on every other level and higher levels are also more important. Now how do you promote people? Well find a general measure of how good people are at anything let's call it…
I think the basic problem has more to do with the inability to verify how competent someone is. In the real world I suspect the ability to fake competence is often what is promoted to the highest levels.
Not so much as an inability to verify, as it is an ability to fake, then.
A sword can still cut a man fatally. But on the modern battlefield, no soldier is going to let you get close enough to use it.
In other words, the system is going to be gamed. Only systems that are robust against gaming will succeed. Systems which can exploit the gaming will thrive. (Perhaps Digg and Reddit are examples of this?)
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#19This 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 t…
That was more or less my thoughts as well, after reading this post. Did you read the actual paper? I would be interested in knowing a little bit more about which method they used to simulate the situation.
Re: Why Incompetence Spreads Through Big Organisations
#20Earlier 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.
Most of organizations in our society have hierarchical structure. The goverment, military, academic, enterprise show you the hierarchical traits in position titles. The pyramid is necessary for managing responsibilities and decision making. Social stratification is normal to all societies to some extend.
> The pyramid is necessary for managing responsibilities and decision making.
It's actually one way of making decisions and managing responsibilities. It's likely the most common because it evolved from the manufacturing-era model (think Henry Ford making cars). Ford's model evolved from looking at the military.
Ford has a famous line - “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?”
It's possible that a pair of hands that took direction would be ideal in Ford's system (though I doubt it - Honda's done much better by actually harnessing the brains connected with the pairs of hands). But that hierarchical model is counterproductive in today's knowledge and networked economy: you want to use the resources and knowledge at all levels of your company, and that way you do that is by decentralizing authority and decision-making power to the edges.
Look at the open-source model of building software; it's pretty damn far from hierarchical, and it's at least as successful at creating value compared with the more hierarchical model most software companies use.