Assessment Center
School and university examinations have something artificial: never again in professional life will the performance evaluation be so compressed to a very concrete examination situation. There is no equivalent for exams in professional life.
The closest thing to university examinations in professional life are assessment center before hiring or a promotion. However, if the university exams are about a specific subject whose performative knowledge is being tested, assessment center are about something different: can the applicant (1) recognize and (2) fulfil the expectations placed on him. Already the first task poses a challenge: Different corporations with different officially announced cultures also have different requirements for the habitus of their new recruits. Expectations can also shift above hierarchical levels. It is the job of the applicants to know these expectations. And then it is also necessary to fill this recognized expectation spontaneously and possibly in an artificially induced stress situation through demonstrated behaviour.
Thus, the assessment center has the artificial situation in common with the university examination, but unlike the latter, skills are tested that are decisive for professional success: Being able to recognize and fulfil expectations is an essential cornerstone of a corporate career. In the subject matter of the examination, the assessment center is therefore true-to-life.
Two observations
(i) Since we’re forced to work from home and I am therefore permanently sitting in front of a monitor, a mouse, and a keyboard, I have created many more PowerPoint slides myself. In recent years I have only rarely done this. Most of the time I only made handwritten sketches, shared them, and then commented on the finished slides in short meetings. Typical manager.
(ii) My private standard device used to be a common laptop, of course with a physical keyboard. Most of the idle time I spent typing something into this keyboard. Either a text or I did some programming or just played around with the console of one of my servers. Today my standard device is a tablet - without a physical keyboard. Most of my time now I spend reading texts. I reach most websites by using favorites or auto-complete after entering the first two or three characters.
Maybe the tool determines the craft more than one could wish for.
Written in May 2020 | Category: Technology
Endgame Fallacy
Being able to reduce complexity and thereby make facts discussable and, above all, problems solvable is one of the core skills in modernity. There are various tricks for this. One trick that I encounter from time to time is what I call endgame analysis: Sometimes developments are complex, but one can describe relatively well what kind of state there is at their end. So you describe this final state and then derive actions from it without having to discuss every intermediate stage.
But this reduction in complexity is usually accompanied by the loss of temporality. And that is often problematic. For in most cases it does play a role whether the end state is reached very soon or in the distant future - and above all whether its occurrence is brought about earlier or delayed.
An example: "In the long run we're all dead" (Keynes) is undoubtedly correct. But whether one dies sooner or later is not unimportant. "If I'm dead in the endgame anyway, I can actually (today) also stop eating" is therefore also an obviously stupid suggestion. However, relatively often I encounter endgame considerations, where exactly such a thing is derived.
So be on your guard against this fallacy. Unless you want to cheat - for that, endgame considerations are relatively well suited...