Phedon Nicolaides, professor at the European Institute of Public Administration, Maastricht, The Netherlands, proposes [in an essay in the Cyprus Mail] a twist on the Ig-Nobel-Prize-winning method of promoting people randomly in an organization:
In September 2010 three Italian scientists won the infamous Ig Nobel prize in the category of management…. [Their solution, based on the Peter Principle] is either to promote randomly or also promote apparently incompetent or unqualified members of staff….
Here is, therefore, my proposal for achieving a fairer system of hiring and promoting, which is partly based on randomness. Instead of promoting staff randomly, it should be the selectors and evaluators that should be identified through lottery from a larger pool of candidates. If their names are drawn randomly, say, the day before any hiring or promotion assessment, it will be very difficult for any political party to influence the outcome. The outcome should be fairer at hardly any additional bureaucracy.
BONUS: One of the Ig Nobel Prize winners responds, also in the Cyprus Mail:
Dear Professor Nicolaides
I read with interest your comment and I think your proposal is a nice implementation to solve bureaucracy and nepostism. Our study is very simplified of course, we have only corroborated numerically what Peter observed in the 60s and found that randomness helps. Our results are very robust and can be applied not only to people. One can find applications to computers, ideas, models, etc. After all evolution in nature proceeds in the same way by random mutations which give a finite probability of success even to the most remote possible changes.
Best regards
Andrea Rapisarda
http://www.dfa.unict.it/home/rapisarda/