Professor, researcher, consultant, IO psych podcast host, and instrument-rated private pilot
I was interviewed by Business Insider last week about Elon Musk's intent to use leaderboards to reduce government inefficiency and waste as co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). That was honestly one of the weirdest sentences I've written on this platform. So far. Government inefficiency is certainly a legitimate issue that needs addressing, but I am not convinced that creating a "department" to address it is the best path toward a solution. I'm even less convinced that leaderboards are a reasonable strategy. As I've written elsewhere, effective gamification design requires identifying meaningful behaviors to target for change and thoughtfully developing game elements or game systems that encourage those behaviors. Simply throwing a leaderboard at a problem is as likely to make it worse as make it better. To expand on the example that I gave to the reporter, whatever you incentivize with a leaderboard is what you'll get. The human challenge is matching the incentivization target to what you actually want. For example, if you decide to make a leaderboard that tracks how many times a government employee files an "inefficiency report," you're probably going to end up with a lot of reports like, "My coworker annoys me, so I'm going to call them inefficient, so that you fire them." In short, wanting efficiency but rewarding reports gets you more reports, not more efficiency. That's not to say that gamification couldn't help in this situation, but that requires good engineering to avoid a sticky web of unintended consequences. Nothing I've heard about this process so far suggests that good engineering will be involved. But I suppose we will see!
Has Elon shared any more details than the below tweet? It appears Business Insider had alterior motives for this interview. As far as I can tell the leaderboard in question will simply be a record of volume of waste. This is one precise agreed upon goal. The actual issue of what goes into the waste is a separate issue. How they handle a grant in Zimbabwe for an obscure research project that is tied to a key health initiative is indeed a separate problem. How they tease this apart and post it to the leaderboard is the challenge. Currently their is a community notes leaderboard that is working well for x. I'm not sure gamification is the object of the problem for a DOGE leaderboard at this time.
What a wild world we live in...at the end of the day everything goes back to "the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B"
Principal Research Scientist at DDI | Development Dimensions International
1moThis is the man who will bring people to Mars in the next decade. Don't doubt him. He will find the gamification system is not efficient and improve it quickly, a true successful entrepreneur. Maybe he will contact you and ask you to help improve the system? Also, have you read how he fires people left and right for not achieving their goals? This is a hint what is coming. Maybe for a good reason knowing that 80 percent of work is done by 20 percent of people.