Runaway selection happens when organizations compete with each other far beyond the point where it’s rational to do so. We see this in species as well–peacocks have ungainly and inefficient feather displays because, as Alice’s Red Queen said, “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”
In organizations, there’s a desire to do good work. Pressure to outdo the others. And a desire for deniability and certainty. Add those up, and we are left with a quest for more long after it’s helpful.
How many people applied for that good job you just posted? 1,000? Spread the word, more applications must be a good thing. It’s not unusual for digitally-amplified hiring processes to see 5,000 applications arrive in a day. 360,000 people applied for a slot in the Goldman Sachs internship program. Would a million have been better?
And then, let’s use AI to pick the 80 best candidates and interview each via Zoom.
Take the ten best and put them through a series of interviews, rotating through each person on the team, including aptitude tests and real-time projects. In many organizations, there are 6, 7 or even 10 rounds of interviews.
It costs a typical organization more than $14,000 to hire an executive, and the time and emotional cost to applicants is many times that. This all leads to lowered productivity, wasted time and a damaged brand.
What do we get in exchange for this investment? Are the people you hire with this exhausting/exhaustive process adding more value than the ones we found with much less time ten years ago?
And the second question: would your third or fourth choice have worked out just as well, if not better?
If Red Queen hiring actually worked, then we’d see that organizations that spend more time on it would outperform those that don’t. It’s pretty clear to me that this isn’t the case–it’s not an investment in the future, it’s a sign of bureaucratic stasis, a quest for deniability, and a thoughtless pursuit of the wrong sort of more. We’ve made it much easier for people to apply for jobs, but done little to improve what happens after the applications arrive.
What if we spent the time wasted on Red Queen maximization doing something useful instead–training and orientation, perhaps. Interview until you find someone who can do the job, then hire them. Then get back to work.
We can’t even ask that question, because it feels like a compromise. Without any data at all, we’ve bought into the Red Queen race that our false proxies, sufficiently polished, deliver better results. In fact, there’s a huge increase in the cost to the applicants and the organization, but no measurable increase in the value created.
Successful fishermen understand that casting an ever-wider net is not always the best way to catch the fish you need.
It requires skill and effort. It can be taught. And it’s worth prioritizing.
When we wing it, allocate little time to it or assume it’s a side effect of our work, we diminish the effort and blur our focus.
“I wonder what it’s like to be you” is part of what makes us human, but we’re rarely as focused on this work as we could be.
Simply announcing how hard it is is a fine place to begin.
Where did the five-second rule come from?
Science makes it clear that if disgusting germs are going to go from the floor to your toast, it’s going to take less than five seconds for that to happen.
It might as well be the four-minute rule as far as food safety goes.
But it’s compelling and universal. A chance to fix a relatively small error, one associated with an outcome you were hoping for.
Innovation involves lots of failure, but we rarely encourage ourselves to adopt a five-second rule when we’re brainstorming, inventing or developing what’s next.
Please do.
Tiny mistakes are fixable. Avoiding them is how we get stuck.
There’s the fast of a drag racer. Purpose-built, difficult to steer, expensive and fragile.
There’s the fast of the marathon runner. Beat by a sprinter every time, but able to keep it up for hours.
And the fast of a well-integrated team. Communications, clarity, and respect enable them to produce far more in less time.
Or consider the fast of the craftsperson who spends most of her time studying, measuring, and sharpening before even beginning.
We could choose the fast of the iterator, who produces a dozen or a hundred variations in the time a resistance-fueled perfectionist produces just one. Sometimes it’s faster to do it over than it is to do it right the first time.
And there’s the fast of the follower, copying what came before, avoiding false starts and errors and only coming out ahead at the end.
There’s the fast of the resilient and quick agile professional, who builds with the unexpected in mind. Flexible and not brittle.
You can have the fast-per-project of a custom one-off, or the fast per unit of a high-quality mass-production process.
The fast of chickening out and getting back to work, or the fast of dancing with the chicken and doing what matters.
Or the fast of the well-maintained craft, which rarely gets sidelined with a crisis.
What they all have in common is intent. Each requires trade-offs and is chosen with a purpose in mind.
And then, of course, there’s the slow of “let’s see what happens” or “we always do it this way” or “I don’t care enough to do this well.”
In our dreams, the laws of thermodynamics don’t apply, and gravity works in strange ways.
We can jump across a chasm and stick the landing on the other side.
This freedom is important. It’s part of what makes a dream, a dream.
It’s not just the physics of moving matter, though. It’s the physics of relationships, of money, of how the world works.
All good.
Unless we bring these dreams to our projects. At some point, the real world shows up. And we should acknowledge that while dreams are essential, they are simply our dreams… they don’t come with the guarantee that others will see them the way we do.
Gravity isn’t just a good idea. It’s the law.
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