When gatekeepers select for loyalty or non-threat rather than competence, quality declines cumulatively.
Unattributed, and the mechanism is cumulative: each round of loyalty-selected appointments has less competence available to select from, so the decline compounds rather than plateauing.
In practice
- A department head appoints a deputy a little weaker than himself, and the deputy runs the same calculation four years later.
- An agency whose senior appointments favour non-threatening candidates finds its shortlists worse each cycle, and no single decision was wrong.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- How organisations behave when nobody is steering