Assessment VERSUS Innovation

Everywhere I turn, I am asked to provide an assessment that is straight out of the metrics and assumptions of the Industrial Age.   I bet you are too.  Weve lost the history of assessment so most of us think of it as contemporary but much of the rationale for testing, grading, assessing, evaluating in a quantified fashion goes straight back to the dawn of the assembly line and the modern office, back to the beginning of education schools and business schools.  If you look at most educational institutions, corporate HR departments, and government agencies today, they have adopted forms of evaluation  that bear the legacy of methods designed in the early twentieth century to make evaluating the quality of people and their work as easy as inspecting a Model T as it rolls off the assembly line.  The  byword of the Model T is that you can have it in any color so long as its black.  One size fits all.   Were still judging as if were trying to ensure that uniform, efficient sizing up of human achievement, accomplishment, effort, and productivity.

Remember, everyone, the world has changed in the last two decadesbut not evaluation methods.  We have entered a new era of distributed customizable knowledge, where tasks are shared and accomplishments are iterative (in the sense that others can emend the result, that improvement is continual, and participation is the desired goal).  Thats how the Internet was built and how the Mozilla browser and Apache are both sustained and maintained.  Yet our prevailing methods of assessment presume nothing has changed since Ford rolled out his first automobiles and that the goal is exactly, precisely the Model T.

More and more assessment is detached from the standard of excellence it is supposed to measure in some productive way.  Because of the growing mismatch between the ways we work and learn today and the antiquated (and increasingly rigid) forms of assessment to which we subject ourselves and others, its time for a major rethinking.   At my workplace, I am required to provide an assessment of those I supervise.  Thats fine.  But Im also required  to rank them.  Since I spend the year working hard (we all do) to improve how we work together as a collaborative team, I can think of nothing more harmful to what we accomplish together than saying Person 1 is better than Person 2.  That method of assessment undermines the efficiency and excellence of the team.   It is also arbitrary.   If I am a truly good supervisor working throughout the year to ensure that each person performs not only to her potential but to the specific requirements of her job, I am exactly not trying to encourage my teammates to compete against one another but to, together, strive for excellence.  If one member is not performing to full potential, it should be my job to say where improvement is needed and want the path is.  Its not even relevant to specify that she happens not to be as good as Sarah or Johnny.  Thats not aiming high enough.  Its simply aiming relative to our small group.   That comparison happens to be gratuitous and arbitrary, relevant not to her job but to who happens to work around her.    And it is destructive of management goals  that, as a supervisor, I set and aspire to throughout the year.

I recently spent time with a British scholar who noted that the new  government promotion and salary-guidelines require that  she produce four referred articles a year.  Why four?  Two great ones dont mean more than four that may not be great?   Thats how we measure intellectual productivity?  One refereed book does not count.?  This is a standard that is harmful to the sciences, since it says publication of those four works a year is more important than the major scientific find that might result in one hugely influential and important article in due time, not four turned out to someone elses measurement.  But in her field of film studies, where a book has been long deemed more important than articles, it also means an arbitrary application of someone elses arbitrary standard to her field.   It undercuts excellence in all fields and is the round peg in the square hole in others.

More and more of us experience such discrepancies, back again to what Ive talked about before as the difference between standardization and high standards.  The rigidity of contemporary assessment may well turn out to be a death knell.   Practices often become more stringently enforced when they no longer have real utility and before they are about to be transformed or discarded.    In the meantime, many of us are stuck with assessment methods that inhibit excellence, impede creativity, and serve as the antithesis to innovation.   The measure may well be simple and efficient.   The tragedy Is that, in many cases, we have reached a binary:  assessment versus innovation.