Black Box Employee

The Black Box Employee

MAY 08, 2013

  One thing humans are good at is learning. Compared to even the smartest machine, the dumbest human will learn far more efficiently. When an employee is told what to do, he will do it. He will listen to the instructions, translate it into actions and he will try his best to do it with differing results. There is another way to handle employees. Tell them the expected outcome. Measure the expected outcome. Tie their bonuses to the achievements of the expected outcome. Let them have a stake in that outcome. Then cut them lose. They will start optimizing their behaviour to achieve that expected outcome. They may not come up with the optimal method initially, but when shown a method that leads to better results, they will immediately adopt that method. For any such black box system to optimise itself, it needs a feedback loop. The feedback has to be immediate and affect the system directly. This way, the learning loop works directly and optimally.  By Mark Essien