You would think, but actually there’s been some recent research that I think has interesting conclusions. The example, which is semi-related, is performance as a manager. When promoted using merit based, people tended to perform worse bcz they are promoted based on past performance in unrelated roles. When promoted randomly, the people who excelled at being a manager stayed in that position, and outperformed others who were promoted based on merit.
The point being, you don’t know who’s going to be good at something based on past performance in unrelated roles. We’ve built an entire system based on that concept, and it’s not really that surprising that it doesn’t work that well. If I can find the research article again, I’ll link it.
If you try to do that you need metrics for evaluation and then you get people gaming the metrics. One example is academia.
You would think, but actually there’s been some recent research that I think has interesting conclusions. The example, which is semi-related, is performance as a manager. When promoted using merit based, people tended to perform worse bcz they are promoted based on past performance in unrelated roles. When promoted randomly, the people who excelled at being a manager stayed in that position, and outperformed others who were promoted based on merit.
The point being, you don’t know who’s going to be good at something based on past performance in unrelated roles. We’ve built an entire system based on that concept, and it’s not really that surprising that it doesn’t work that well. If I can find the research article again, I’ll link it.
Edit: found it
What’s surprising to me isn’t that the random promotion system works over the performance in past unrelated roles system…
What’s surprising to me is that you practically never see the only other logical conclusion used in the business world much.
Aptitude testing.
True I honestly find the random promotion thing to be super unintuitive, and would struggle to do it if I was in a position to make those decisions.