AC and IQ

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There used to be a time when businesses were in awe of the organisational and management skills of certain leading armies. Armies had hundreds of thousands of personnel and were thus avantgarde in terms of personnel affairs at a time when megacorporations were very uncommon. These times ar eover, except in the U.S. where general militarism still gives the word "military" a good sound and reputation, deserved or not. This silliness goes even so far as Sun Tzu adaptions for business strategy.

Some of the army innovations for personnel affairs were about tabulations and primitive computing. One innovation originating from Germany was the assessment centre.

The 18th century method of recruiting new officers in much of Europe was about checking if the man is a nobleman (necessary at least for cavalry and infantry) and then having a meal with him to check whether he was 'cultured'. 'Cultured' people believed that they were destined to lead until the 1960's in some countries (*cough* UK *cough*).

This aristocrats-only approach changed into a more general elites-only approach during the 19th century, but without a satisfactory process. Having the school degree required for university access became a basic requirement in some countries, for exmaple. The German army invented such a process for evaluating candidates, and today's shapes of the process are called "assessment centre" (AC). It's mostly an attempt to simulate the job and observe how a candidate fares.

The results are mixed, to say the least. I'm not easily impressed by people, so I won't use that as a criterion, but by my observation about half of the officers shouldn't be officers of any rank. Half of those (overall quarter) shouldn't even be non-commissioned officers.

The AC should have weeded those out.

Studies about assessment centres in the business world are controversial. Some studies conclude that the AC fails to predict job success, others conclude it's a fine (albeit expensive) tool.

So it appears that armies weren't all that competent after all even back in the times when people thought of armed bureaucracies as innovative.

There's a non-controversial alternative, though: You could simply conduct a proper intelligence test, demand an OK primary education graduation, check for a clean criminal offence convictions slate and  conduct a health check. These things are done anyway. They may be sufficient.

I suppose we could do with these simple tests, a trial period and a hefty emphasis on the IQ test result.

• IQ 120+ officer
• IQ 110+ NCO
• IQ 100+ enlisted personnel in demanding jobs
• IQ 90+ enlisted personnel for a few most simple jobs

(I should mention that I want to see a much smaller share of NCOs and especially officers in overall personnel numbers than we've got in the Bundeswehr.)

We should furthermore keep the workaholic officers and NCOs away from leadership jobs and limit them to staff jobs.

High intelligence is a requirement for many things. I've very often observed that people are simply incapable of reasoning about something complicated. Part of that was bad faith, part was stubbornness and part was an obvious shortfall of intelligence.

You cannot solve demanding problems if your team cannot understand the problem or cannot understand a proposal for its solution, much less devising such a proposal. Too stupid people can even hold back (and easily outnumber!) the smart ones in a team.

This reminds me of a general ossification trend in Western countries, or in particular procurement processes. We have many small injustices and private financial issues, and welfare states try to address all these in detail rather than with a wide brush. This leads to much complicated regulation, complicated forms (income tax!), much process with substantial administrative effort and in the end there's still injustices and private financial issues. Likewise, we try to avoid corruption and nepotism in procurement by writing ever more rules and implementing checks - all this to the point of having a procurement system that's much slower and likely also more wasteful than free hand procuring by the minister in a functioning democratic country would be.

Whatever the candidate selection process is in large corporations or in armies; it doesn't appear to do a good job. Maybe we should slim it down to essentials.

That would put a premium on judging performance on the job, which is incompatible with the near-automatic promotions up to LtCol rank in certain armies, of course.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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