Chance Promotion

Past performance, many say, is the best predictor of future performance. The mathematics of some professors in Italy, however, seem to suggest differently. Granted with the 2010 IgNoble award for management, Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy sustain organisations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.

Their study is inspired by the Peter Principle that states 'every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence'. According to the researchers "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."

Holding the above two features in a given model of an organisation, and using agent based simulation and a game-theory approach the researchers tested different promotion strategies to find, counterintuitively, that "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 competence."

I would sustain the parameters of the study don't hold any resemblance to reality, though you can't help but smile at the proposition. It would certainly be a fun one to experiment with... and walk away from swiftly.