Not A Blog™

I have never talked to anyone who enjoys performance reviews. In fact, I’ve never even talked to anyone who was indifferent about them. At most, people shrug and say they need to be done, even when they, themselves, are not a fan. Reviews are universally loathed, and everybody seems to recognize that they do not report unbiased data. They are hated and they are inaccurate, yet they persist.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this is. At the risk of committing the fallacy of the false analogy, I think useful parallels can be drawn between a corporate performance review and grading in schools. The basic purposes of these differ, but the process is almost exactly the same. In the case of reviews, the stated purpose is to evaluate past performance and redefine future goals to take this into account, ultimately with the expectation that worker productivity will increase. The stated purpose of grading is to measure the pupil’s acquisition of information—or if you want to be less clinical about it, how much they “learned”. The process for each is evaluation on a graded scale.

A grade scale is a useful tool in any case where you have unambiguous standards. You take a multiple choice test, for example, which requires rote recall of facts, or a mathematics exam where the equation is either solved correctly or incorrectly. You can either spell the word or you can’t. You read the book or you didn’t. The quantifiable tally used when measuring correctness is why the grade scale works.

The day I stopped trying is still relatively clear in my memory. First of all, I should say that is a bit of hyperbole—I never tried very hard in school before this day (actually, I rarely tried at all), and there were things I tried hard on after. But it did mark the beginning of when I started purposely getting questions wrong on tests so that I would stay firmly in the “B” range—a practice I continued through the end of high school. (I didn’t do it in college.)

You might be curious as to why I should purposely sabotage my grades in school.
My reasoning: let me show you it.

The project from which this arose was a typical English class book project: Read a book, make a poster, talk about the book. The book I chose was Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, and it was a neat book. I liked it. The speech part, like most grade-school speeches, had a time limit, needing to be between three and five minutes.

I hate being timed (especially to such rigorous standards) because I end up watching the clock and losing track of what I’m trying to talk about. So I got the following idea: if I pick a song between three and five minutes, and set the speech to that, then I don’t have to worry about the time factor! I make sure that I’m hitting certain parts of the speech during certain parts of the song, and viola. The length takes care of itself.

I was pretty pleased with this solution. I went with the Mission Impossible theme and described the book to the audience as if they were listening to the description on an self-destructive cassette tape. It was about three and a half minutes—a little bit fast, since I had a lot to say and I was nervous—and from what I was told, it was entertaining. It certainly wasn’t boring.

If there was one thing most other people’s speeches were, it was boring. A friend of mine stood and talked for the requisite time, and it was a painfully yawn-inducing book report. He fulfilled most of the requirements and got an “A-”. My report also fulfilled most of the requirements, and even though all my classmates and the teacher thought it was by far the most entertaining and creative, it received exactly the same grade, “A-”.

There were two reasons, the teacher explained. One, she did not have a way of grading what I did. There was a “creativity” factor in the grade, but it was the poster. I did something so novel that there was no blank on her grade sheet to account for it.

Secondly, because she was furiously trying to write so many comments, she missed requirements that I purposely went out of my way to fulfill, because she couldn’t keep up. In particular, I made it a point to look at every person’s forehead. I hate making eye contact, but one of the requirements was to engage the audience by looking around the room, so I went up and down every row, quite systematically, looking at foreheads rather than eyes (no one can tell at that distance) to make absolutely sure this was done. The teacher only looked up at me once or twice during the entire thing because she was writing so much, and subsequently graded me as not having made eye contact, even though she hadn’t been watching.

The moral of the story was clear: being creative hurt my grade. Not only could the teacher not account for it, but I was additionally penalized because of her own inability to keep up.

I don’t want to imply that the teacher was an old bag who went out of her way to demoralize her students. She was quite nice, and acknowledged these short comings as part of her process. I hope she fixed it for later classes, but more importantly, that experience was hardly unique. I’ve been penalized in a number of instances for being “too” creative—and not even disregarding the rules, either, but doing something so unexpected that the rules don’t even have anything to say about it. School rewards high achievers, I would read later in a psychology paper, not creative thinkers. I didn’t know this at the time, but I did know enough to realize something was fundamentally wrong when I worked creatively and was penalized for it, while other people memorized boring facts that anyone with half a brain could look up on the internet in 0.2 seconds, and they got grades just as good.

Another perfect example of this was programming my TI-83 calculator. I loved that calculator because it was easy to understand. One of my math teachers, while discussing the quadratic formula, said during class one day, “you can use the calculator on the test, but it’s not going to help you. The test asks questions like the value under the radical, or to simplify without decimals, but the calculator only returns the final answer in decimal form.”

Well I can fix that, I thought, and spent the rest of the math class programming the calculator to do exactly that. By lunch, I had a full blown quadratic equation solver which asked you what you wanted to know (full answer, fractional answer, under the radical), and what format you wanted it in (fraction, decimal, simplified or unsimplified). If it was a fraction, it actually formatted the output to match what the answer was supposed to look like, so you could just copy it right off the screen. You plugged in A, B, and C, and there you go.

I failed the test, but scored perfectly on the quadratic equation section. Which goes to show: I could program the most powerful and easiest to use quadratic equation solver in the school, but it didn’t matter because I would do things like forget to account for a minus sign here, or draw a graph backwards there, and other little errors which compounded and led to me failing the test.

Eventually I decided I didn’t want good grades. I didn’t care about memorizing facts, which was what most of the tests were about. I did great in non-fact classes like art, but also, I began to purposely mark answers wrong on tests where I knew the right answer. I did this with the intention of appearing less knowledgeable than I was, because I could tell that the less someone knew, the less that was expected of them. Someone can be the most creative person on the planet, but is still expected to know what other people deemed important. So I stopped bothering to be creative most of the time (for my classes), and I actively sought to lower (or more correctly: mediate) other’s expectations of what I could do. There was no point in standing out.

So what does this have to do with corporate performance reviews? Simple. The same thing happens.

I’ve written before how, at the bank, the tellers were expected to up-sell customers to financial products. I never did this for a variety of reasons, but I was professional and precise enough otherwise that it didn’t matter. My bosses recognized that I knew how to run a drawer and that I could efficiently and politely handle customers, so the fact that I didn’t sell any products, while officially frowned upon, was not a source of concern.

This made me wonder why the bank put such pressure on that aspect of the reporting. If you were a good up-seller, you could earn hundreds of dollars in bonuses every month, depending on factors like how many you sold and if there was a special monthly incentive attached to it. But actually doing the banking part of your banking job earned you no bonuses at all and a merely satisfactory review. This still seems backwards to me today.

The larger the company, the worse it gets. As you add levels of management to an organization, a disconnect arises between the levels. This cannot be avoided, but it has a secondary consequence which exacerbates the problem.

Humans receive their sensory input in analogue format. The neural net that is the brain makes fluid rating analyses because it experiences the world in a fluid way. The notion of “corporate personhood” is a legal one, but I find it interesting to consider in a more general context. If a corporation can, in fact, be considered an entity that responds to external stimuli and adjusts its actions appropriately to achieve its goals—what sort of sensory input would it use?

It uses numbers. The information being input into the “brain” (C-level) of a corporation is not a continuum of analogue input, it’s a discreet packeting of information in the form of numbers. For some things, numbers work exceedingly well. Money, for example, is easily quantified. Number of units shipped. Total number of gallons of gas consumed by the fleet vehicles. Square footage of warehouses. QC failure rate.

These things are easily quantifiable because they are discreet and/or binary. The unit either failed during QC or it didn’t. If it passed, a check goes over here. If it failed, the check goes over there. Every specified period of time, we divide the second box by the first, multiply by 100, and hopefully that number has gone up. Corporations (and people) can understand this, and use that data to make cost-benefit decisions to increase revenue. Simple.

Except in terms of human metrics. The company is made up of employees who, the general consensus believes, can be measured according to certain criteria in the same way one can measure QC or units shipped. The entire corporate structure for the past 120 years or so has been based around the idea that as we define more parameters (goals), we can determine how effective an individual is within their assigned capacity, and we can take appropriate action.

The problem with this should, hopefully, be obvious at this point. Everybody says they value creativity because they do, in fact, value creativity. But no one knows how to measure it. Companies say they want people who “think outside the box”, but they are baffled any time they find these people because there is not a check box on the grade sheet to account for outside the box thinking. Even if there were, this is not a quantifiable commodity, so a number here would be worse than useless. It would appear to measure something which it does not. And furthermore, people who do think outside the box (whatever the hell that means in the first place), are not necessarily the most shining individuals by the standards which are measured.

We are only just beginning to understand how creativity affects the culture as a whole. The only way a corporation will ever be able to understand creativity is when it can be quantified, because that is the format it uses to sense the external world. Anything currently used by a company breaks down to this. Even when they say something vague such as “art on the walls improves morale”, it really means “art on the walls causes the numbers on the morale survey to increase, indicating an improvement in morale” which is hardly the same thing. But it is the way companies absorb information.

We have the same problem in our public school system. When the economy slumps and budgets tighten, what is the first thing to go? The first things dropped are the things which are difficult to quantify the results from: art programs. We can numerically increase the score on any math or science subject because these scores are derived from quantifiable inputs like fact memorization ability. We have absolutely no idea how to quantify an increase in artistic capability—so how valuable is it, really? And besides, being able to paint better doesn’t help us compete on the world market when foreign countries are passing us on standardized tests.

Or doesn’t it? The fact is, no one knows, because the think tanks and companies in a position to make this statement are effectively “blind” to the sort of advantage an artistic society has. They cannot sense the data; the numbers are too far diluted in secondary and tertiary cause-and-effect. Almost anyone you talk to seems to intuit that the arts are important somehow, but creative thinking is not valued the way mathematics is valued, because it cannot be measured the way mathematics can be measured.

The No Child Left Behind act feeds directly into this. Some children will always be left behind; it’s just an unfortunate reality. But, perhaps counterintuitively, the way to leave less children behind is to not count how many children are being left behind. Some children don’t stand up to be counted that way and some of them—like me—go out of their way not to be. The more one tries to regulate this process, the worse the numbers will become.

I’m not sure that we as a society would be comfortable or even able to give up metering rubrics. It promises a reference to measure change, so even when it’s completely fabricated, it carries the weight of authority. However, before we make any significant progress in the advancement of mankind, we’ll need recognize which human traits can safely be quantified, and which are outside the capabilities of this tool—and then stop forcing them into boxes.

-Ted

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