Training & Filtering

What will improve is what is tested.

Organizations get better at their core function in two distinct ways. The first way is by improving the skills of its members. The second way is by filtering its members for skill.

For instance, imagine a baseball team that is first formed by a group of people more or less at random. The team probably isn’t very good at baseball, overall. The organization can train the individuals in skills like running and catching, but it can also replace the worst-performing members over time. Even if each eliminated player is replaced by another random person, the team will gradually improve if only the worst-performing people are eliminated each time, as they’re naturally below average.

So, a process of both training in the core skills of baseball and filtering the organization’s membership for baseball-related skills will gradually improve the team at baseball. It won’t improve the team at performing classical music together.

That seems like an obvious thing to say, but it’s worth thinking about. Often, the core thing your organization does is hard to measure and hard to train. But organizations know that training and filtering are the improvement machines, so they just sort of substitute in something else without realizing it. So while an organization might really wish it was training & filtering for teaching ability, what it’s really doing is training & filtering for compliance and obedience, for example.

Be careful how you calibrate.