An amusing implication of the Peter Principle wins an Ignoble Award

The most recent Ignoble Award given out for research in management (awarded in 2010) caught my eye.  The study is available here and the official reference is: Pluchino, A. Rapisarda, A.; Garofalo, C. (2010). "The Peter principle revisited: A computational study". Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 389 (3): 467–472. 

In essence, they proved the Peter Principle.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Peter Principle  it is the practice of promoting people when they are really good, with the consequence that you are taking them out of the job they are good at and putting them in a different one.  Simple probability predicts that they will be less good at their new job then they were at the previous one where they excelled.  This research found that organizations would do better if they promoted people at random.  This way they would be equally taking people out of jobs they are good at and out of jobs they are bad at. Again, it is simply the law of averages at work.

But doesn’t this imply that the BEST way to award promotions is always to promote the worst performers?  It would be kind of scary to find out that this is actually the best strategy. 

Do you think it would?  Let me know in the comments.

Can gamification save the world?

One of the messages of the book is that games/gamification can have an impact on the long term health of society itself.  The basic reason is that it gives us an opportunity to learn and practice some skills that are essential to deal with the complex world we have created for ourselves.

1.  Games allow us to practice with long term goals without having to wait such a long time for the learning to bear fruit.  In games we can accelerate the passage of time, experiencing many cycles in quick succession. 

2.  Similarly, games allow us to practice ecosystems thinking.  Ecosystems thinking involves grasping the complex interplay of several components of a system.  In a game, we can make the interactions more transparent.  We can also start a new player out with small interactions and then scale them up to make learning easier and more accurate. 

3. We can also facilitate pilot experimentation, which is practice with no real consequences.   We don’t want pilot trainees to crash any real planes while learning to fly.  But practice in a flight simulator is great (assuming it is designed for real learning as well as gamified).

4.  Massively multiplayer games give us large sample size simulations.  At the moment, we don’t actually know how to model complex systems like the environment, or international trade.  We change one thing and all kinds of crazy unexpected side effects happen.  Pretty soon we have a Black Swan like the real estate market crash/financial crisis in 2007-10.    Instead of practicing on the real world, we can recruit 100,000 people to play a gamified simulation.  Because they are real people, they will react a lot more like real people in the real world and then give us a better idea of what will happen.  We can prepare in advance or just do something different in the first place.

So it we create a game that simulates some aspect of the real world, recruit 100,000 people to play, and then mine the results for actionable hypotheses, perhaps we can figure out what to do about the environment (World Without Oil) or some other potentially catastrophic situation we are getting ourselves in to.

Fundmantal attributes define a game.

I really liked this part of the book.  She identifies six different kinds of games.  These are different not because of superficial attributes, but because they are fun/effective for fundamentally different reasons.  I like this so much because it has fantastic implications for designing games, gamifying other systems, and understanding the psychology behind games.  As usual, I will add my two cents for each one.

1.       Busywork games (bejeweled): something to distract you, refresh your right brain, give you rapid and frequent successes, guaranteed feeling of productivity to counteract a lack of productivity in real life.

2.       Knowledge/strategy games (crossword puzzles): large sense of accomplishment due to personal strengths. To counteract failure or lack of feedback in real world.

3.       Physical games (sports): endorphins of fatigue and challenge of competition. To counter boredom in real world.  Lots of opportunity for Fiero.

4.       Discovery games: investigate and explore new worlds (physical, virtual, knowledge) to counteract repetitive determinism in the real world.

5.       Teamwork games (ropes courses): collaboration, cooperation, division of labor, reliance.  To counter solitude in the real world. When your activity is linked to the team, you can’t quit without hurting others (peer pressure to keep going).  When rewards are linked you win or lose together, not competitively.

6.       Creative games  (Sims): make meaningful decisions that create something good (art or function). To counteract transactional activity in real world.

I used some human factors technical terms here, so if you want more information on any of these, feel free to ask in the comments (or shoot me an email).

Human Factors basis for why games are fun.

Charles Mauro published an incredibly insightful case on what makes games work – using Angry Birds as a demonstration.  This is my interpretation of the major points he makes (to see my basic philosophy about gamification, see here and here). I am sure he will let me know if any of it is way off.

Games make a system engaging when/if they:

·         Use a simple basic interaction model that allows users to build a robust schema quickly (during their first user experience).  This reduces the need to learn the interaction model, which most users find frustrating.  It is not as fun as learning content.

·         Have a response time that is fast enough for effective interaction (users get what they need before they need to use it), but slow enough and variable enough to create mystery and anticipation.  The response/feedback should also be slow enough to enable learning (time to process the feedback) and error correction (time to change before an action has irreversible negative consequences) when appropriate.

·         Have some variation just for observation – no learning is necessary but again adds more mystery and anticipation and keeps it from getting stale.

·         Never require more working memory than the user has available. But don't require so little that it becomes boring.  This can be done by including variations that are not essential for use, but enhance use.  This means users can learn them at their own pace and can forget them without penalty.  This keeps it from getting stale.  It also allows users to allocate more working memory when they want to, but less when they need to.

·         Provide breaks periodically to prevent WM and attention from fatiguing.   This is especially effective during phase shifts (when a user makes it to a higher level, there is often a pause to “load” the next one).

·         Enhance mystery by having some responses that appear without any user input and at random intervals.

·         Use audio to give advance warning of pace.  But have the audio vary enough not to get boring.  The mean pace can be equal to the interface pace but vary a little faster and little slower along the way. 

·         The audio is synched with interface actions as well as its pace.

·         The visual complexity matches the game interaction complexity.

Most of these are true for enhancing user experience in general.  They create a sense of "flow".  But they are even more critical for games because without flow a game is just work.   

Are drug company reps "salespeople" for the purposes of labor laws?

This Supreme Court decision is a great example for us to discuss this morning because it (should) make us think about a very nuanced difference in the letter and spirit of the law. 

The basics of the decision is whether drug company external representatives, who are hired and trained for their sales ability, should be considered salespeople under labor law, even though they don’t formally make sales in the traditional sense.  The case revolves around overtime pay.  Traditional salespeople are usually eligible for extra commissions to compensate for their extra time, so the law doesn’t need to guarantee them overtime pay.  Not all salespeople are on commission, but they have enough power to negotiate for it so the law leaves them on their own. Right or wrong, that is the old law that this case revolves around. In contrast, people on pure salary might need some protection from abusive bosses who make them work after hours for no compensation.  

What these drug reps do is a new form of selling that was not envisioned when the labor laws were first created.  They convince the doctors to prescribe the drugs in the future.  But of course doctors need to have a patient on the table when making each individual prescribing decision so there is no formal contract with the salesperson. 

According to the letter of the law, this is not a “sale”. No documents are signed.  No money changes hands.  But what was the law’s spirit?  It was addressed at people who spend their time on the road making sales pitches to potential customers.  They can negotiate for commission based pay even if they don’t actually get any. 

These drug reps can’t get direct commissions because of the limitations I stated above.  Doctors can’t make any final decisions at that time, and it is usually the patient (or his/her insurance) that is paying the bill.  But here is where I agree with the 5 Justices who decided they are still salespeople.  Drug companies have incredibly sophisticated analytics that can model with pretty good accuracy if doctors’ volume of prescribing particular drugs goes up or down and when the change occurs.  So they can see if the rep made a difference.  The reps can negotiate to have commission based incentives based on this just as easily as traditional salespeople can negotiate with traditional sales. 

Personally, I think there are a lot of ethical questions in the whole practice of hardselling doctors on name brand drugs with high profit margins and questionable efficacy compared to cheaper generics, alternative therapies, and even placebos.  But those are topics for other days.  For the narrow question of whether these sales reps are similar to traditional salespeople for the purposes of these labor laws, I think it is a clear yes.

Unless there is something I am missing.  Please educate me in the comments.