Random promotion may be best, research suggests | Education | The Guardian

Quote:

Last month, three Italian researchers were awarded an Ig Nobel prize for demonstrating mathematically that organisations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random. But their research was neither the beginning nor the end of the story of how bureaucracies try – and fail – to find a good promotion method. Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo, of the University of Catania, Sicily, calculated how a pick-at-random promotion scheme compares with other, more enshrined methods. They gave details in the journal Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications. The three based their work on the Peter Principle – the notion that many people are promoted, sooner or later, to positions that exceed their competence. They cite the works of other researchers who had taken tentative steps in the same direction, but they fail to mention an unintentionally daring 2001 study by Steven E Phelan and Zhiang Lin at the University of Texas at Dallas, published in the journal Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory. Phelan and Lin aimed to see whether, over the long haul, it pays best to promote people on supposed merit (we try, one way or another, to measure how good you are), or on an "up or out" basis (either you get promoted quickly or you get the boot), or by seniority (live long and by that measure alone you will prosper). As a benchmark, a this-is-as-bad-as-it-could-possibly-get alternative, they also looked at what happens when you promote people at random. They got a surprise: random promotion, they admitted, performed better than almost every alternative. Phelan and Lin seemed (at least in my reading of their 25-page-long paper) almost shocked by what they found. But where Pluchino, Rapisarda and Garofalo would later, independently, hone and raise this discovery for the world to admire, Phelan and Lin merely muttered, ever so quietly in the middle of a long paragraph, that "this needs to be further investigated in our future studies". They moved on to other things. Human beings, many of them, are clever. Always there is potential to devise a new, perhaps better method of choosing which individuals to promote in an organisation. Phedon Nicolaides, of the European Institute of Public Administration in Maastricht, recently suggested in a newspaper in Cyprus what he sees as an improvement on random promotion: randomly choose the people who will make the promotion decisions. A very different, non-random method was devised for use by the United States Air Force. Details appear in a 170-page paper prepared in 2008 by Michael Schiefer, Albert Robbert, John Crown, Thomas Manacapilli and Carolyn Wong of the Rand Corporation. But regardless of its merits, this scheme may be doomed to rejection purely because it has a curious name. The report is called The Weighted Airman Promotion System. • Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

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I'd love that to be true but, as one of the commentor said:

"Reading the study it says the random promotions being better only hold true if you assume that someones competence at one level has no bearing on the competence at another level.

This is clearly silly, and all you are left with from this study is that if competence isn't transferrable (and hence predictable) then you've as good a chance of getting the right competence by random, which is almost tautalogical".

Furthermore, I just skimmed their work but I do not understand how they can actually compare things in any kind of realistic way... Let's say the US military adopted a random promotion pattern. How do they compare the theoretical results with the real Up-or-Out-System said to be used at the junior levels and merit based system used afterwards?

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Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

"Reading the study it says the random promotions being better only hold true if you assume that someones competence at one level has no bearing on the competence at another level.

Well, thats often the case, if the role changes significantly. That is promotion is usually to a different type of job, and being excellent at one doesn;t necessarily imply you will be any good at the other.

If the random promotion is accompanied by non-random demotion, ie if someone once promoted cannot handle the job they are put back down, then you have the process of evolution working for you!

Seems like a good plan to me, not fun to work in though.

There is absolutely no way in hell this could ever be retrofit to our existing system but it might work well starting from scratch.

F

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