Peter and the Wolf

Incompetence and Irony (with a dash of AI)

Don’t Know Why

“It’s the Peter Principle”, someone opined in conversation the other day. I nodded along and then I thought “Hang on, is that true?” (because that’s what I do…).

We all know what the Peter principle is, don’t we? ‘Everyone gets promoted to a position of incompetence’.

Or do we know it? Is that what was actually said or a common misquotation (of which there are many that litter conversations about management and leadership).

So I did some digging. (OK, I looked it up on Wikipedia but that’s more than most people do!)

The Peter Principle arose in a book of the same name published in 1969 and based on the research of Laurence J. Peter. The actual quote is

“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

It was actually written as a satire, as evidenced by the book’s subtitle ‘Why Things Always Go Wrong’. A further quote illustrates this ironic take:

“Any government, whether it is a democracy, a dictatorship, a communistic or free enterprise bureaucracy, will fall when its hierarchy reaches an intolerable state of maturity.”

The fact that the book was taken at face value is, in itself, rather ironic.

However, it has a ring of truth about it, doesn’t it? Research by others has pointed out that people are promoted on their competence in the existing role, rather than their managerial potential i.e. the capabilities needed for the new role. The classic case is the promotion of the best sales person to be Sales Manager, where they become the worst type of manager possible because they are totally unsuited to the role.

There are some hidden gems in the book. They talk about pseudo-promotions, such as when someone is promoted because of their incompetence, to move them out of the way, which they call “percussive sublimation”. They argue this has a positive effect on staff morale, as other incompetent employees believe they can get promoted again too!

Another one that I love is the “lateral arabesque”, when a person is moved out of the way and given a longer job title. Normally with the word ‘strategic’ in it somewhere, in my experience.

Being really incompetent is bad because it will lead to dismissal. However, being super-competent is equally bad because it disrupts the hierarchy, which will act to protect itself. The super competent person will be pressured to perform less well to fit in or they will be forced out.

Finally, they describe "Summit Competence": when someone reaches the highest level in their organisation and yet is still competent at that level. They say that this only happens because there were not enough ranks in the hierarchy or because the person did not have the time to reach a level of incompetence.

If you’ve worked in a large hierarchical organisation, you can probably think of examples of all of these phenomena. Organisational life is riddled with the absurd and the Peter Principle certainly explains some that.

So what do we conclude about this? It is a truism that all political careers end in failure and the corollary seems to be that all organisational careers end in incompetence (if the hierarchy is big enough). Unless you are too good for the hierarchy, in which case you get ejected. Either way, it’s a form of failure.

That doesn’t mean you can’t make shedloads of money, as we see many examples of executives ‘failing upwards’ on the C-suite merry-go-round. It seems once you’ve got a ticket, you can stay on it as long as you like, jumping from horse to horse with a big pay-check every time. It’s not hard to argue that, whatever these people get their massive rewards for, it’s not their competence.

Hierarchy, then, also promotes mediocrity. The preservation of the hierarchy is paramount and that means people must only perform to the level of their position, or lower.

It’s also reasonable to ask how relevant is the Peter Principle today, as organisations move away from hierarchy? Well, there’s a lot of talk about breaking down hierarchy but rather less action, because the hierarchy preserves itself, so it’s still pretty relevant.

Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope, though. Organisations that are non-hierarchical (in a formal sense, at least) should be able to avoid the Peter Principle and so perform more effectively than hierarchical ones because they are not riddled with incompetence. So competitive pressures will push the dismantling of hierarchies, which is a condition for decrapifying work and making better workplaces.

There’s a long way to go, though, as a cursory glance at the business press will show.

Fantasy

Organisations are theatres of the absurd. I often refer them as ‘Corporate fantasy lands’ that hold us in an enchantment, where we believe in an illusion of a world that doesn’t exist. When we leave, we become disenchanted, literally, as the spell is broken and we see how things really are. We see the ridiculousness of much of organisational life, that our work was nowhere near as important as we believed, that our work friends were really just acquaintances, that we were not valued or essential after all.

We succumb to the enchantment as a necessary act of self-preservation. If we acknowledged how fragile and irrelevant our position was, we would be gripped with fear and insecurity and not be able to cope or function. It’s essential that we feel we belong, that we identify as part of the tribe and demonstrate that by holding the same beliefs, for our sense of safety.

However, paradoxically, succumbing to the enchantment makes us more vulnerable. We are completely dependant on the organisation and at it’s mercy. We lose agency and control of our destiny. So we need to believe but also be aware that it is an illusion, so that we can be prepared for living outside the illusion.

Which is kind of mad, isn’t it?

There are four ways of responding to this (I’m borrowing from Dr. Richard Claydon here but it may not be his latest thoughts on this) and they are:

1. Anger

2. Apathy

3. Action

4. Irony

Anger and Apathy are negative responses that will deplete your resources and lead to bad outcomes. Action can be positive but can also lead to problems if it is hasty or ill-considered.

Richard says that the ironic perspective is the sanest way to cope with the madness , by pointing out the absurdities with humour but without attacking the system or individuals within it (that’s my interpretation of his point). The insights from irony can inform what action can be taken to improve matters. It’s the only way to speak truth to power without getting our head chopped off (although, as he also points out, in Shakespeare, the fool always meets a sticky end anyway).

What this means for you as an individual is that you need to develop yourself and your capabilities so that you have alternatives and are better able to survive outside of the organisation. This is why starting a mutiny is worthwhile because you are developing yourself and increasing your resources. There is a risk that it will cause you to leave the organisation but the act of mutiny makes you better equipped to deal with that eventuality (because it is going to happen, eventually).

If you have achieved your level of incompetence through the Peter Principle, irony may be your only path to some sort of happiness. Revelling in the absurdity and having enough insight to recognise you are part of the problem will enable you to engineer some sort of escape from what is otherwise an eternal treadmill of mediocrity, failure and disappointment.

The Peter principle, then, condemns all of us in a hierarchical organisation to a life of misery eventually (which is why Prof. Antionette Wiebel calls them ‘misery machines’), to which irony is the only antidote. Unless you are completely lacking in self-awareness and unable to recognise the reality of your situation, in which case you can live in blissful ignorance as a happy fool.

About You Now

I am a little wary of books from some time ago because they were written in a very different context. They may capture the wisdom of their age, but not necessarily of this one. However, the Peter Principle seems to hold up pretty well. It even has something to say about AI. (OK, it’s about computing, which back then meant monolithic mainframes and applications like payroll and inventory management, not phones and cloud services. But it’s still relevant).

“Three Observations        

The computer may be incompetent in itself—that is, unable to do regularly and accurately the work for which it was designed. This kind of incompetence can never be eliminated, because the Peter Principle applies in the plants where computers are designed and manufactured.        

Even when competent in itself, the computer vastly magnifies the results of incompetence in its owners or operators.        

The computer, like a human employee, is subject to the Peter Principle. If it does good work at first, there is a strong tendency to promote it to more responsible tasks, until it reaches its level of incompetence.”

1) Early experience of ChatGPT is that it makes stuff up, which is incompetence.

2) Even when it doesn’t make stuff up, its output is only as good as the information it has been trained on and the way it has been programmed by its creators.

For example, someone asked it to come up with an organisational structure for a company and it produced a traditional hierarchy, because that dominates the historical discourse about organisations. It took a different prompt to get it to write about alternatives like self-organising structures. So it is amplifying what has been done in the past, even if that is wrong. It easy to see how this could lead to spectacular incompetence by the AI.

3) It seems inevitable that even where AI is used effectively, its application will be expanded into areas that it is not appropriate for or just incompetent at. Arguably, this is already happening with some chat-bots and data-analytics. This can be described as the ‘Computer Says No’ phenomenon.

I’ve been avoiding writing about AI because it’s in a massive hype cycle at the moment and I haven’t had the mental bandwidth to tackle it but when I do, it will be along these lines i.e. skeptical.

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

I leave you with the final paragraph of the Wikipedia summary

"The concluding chapter applies Peter's Principle to the entire human species at an evolutionary level and asks whether humanity can survive in the long run, or will it become extinct upon reaching its level of incompetence as technology advances.”

In the words of Private Fraser in Dad’s Army “We’re doomed! We’re all doomed!!”

Oh well, we should still be here next week for the 100th edition of the Decrapify Work Not-Newsletter. Maybe I should just get ChatGPT to read the previous 99 and write it for me. Now, there’s a thought…

Apparently, some man is having a sparkly hat put on his head this weekend. A prefect example of the Peter Principle? You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment. Anyway, we get another Bank Holiday and, in true British tradition, it’s probably going to rain. Enjoy!