Still thinking about talent especially following many many conversations with various people in organisations, on the street, in lifts and around the dinner table (where we recently had a discussion about what we meant when we said a chef was ‘talented’ – not surprisingly we couldn’t agree at all – which rather brings me to my point…)
Mitch Kapor, he who created Lotus Development (Lotus 1-2-3 etc.) apparently has a maxim, ‘architecture is politics’ wherein he generally sought to remind us all that we need to pay attention to the architecture of systems if we want to understand their effects. Too right.
Often we see or feel the effects of a system (for example terrible food at an expensive restaurant, stressed employees who are over burdened with work, HR Directors who can’t find enough talent to service the needs of their organsiations) but we don’t see the system architecture that has created those effects. We attempt to deal with the stuff we can see (shout at the waitress, ask questions about priorities or increase starting salaries) without examining the architecture of the system that is creating this stuff. Why not? Too hard. Feels like we would have to start so far upstream (with all our assumptions, world views and histories on the table for review) that is impossible. We are on a treadmill and there is no time to get off.
Except we are the designers of these systems; we create our organisations, our communities, our rules. Don’t we? So we are in charge and therefore we can change them, right? We can but we don’t. there are many reasons why we don’t attempt to change the architecture and many of them are rooted in the difficulty of marshalling collective action.
The notion of a shortage of talent is rooted in the architecture of the system that is responsible for developing and growing people in our world. And that architecture creates its own politics and its own rules. It is those rules and that politics that decides who is talented or not. Those decisions are not made by an independent, rational authority (the examinations board, the GMAT, the cold steel of job interviewers’ competency framework) but by the architecture of the system we have created to shift and sort people into convenient boxes (like eggs, small, medium or large). This is why we can’t agree on a definition of talent even in a specific context (kitchen).
When I push the highly talented people who are designing systems for identifying and recruiting talent to define what it is they are looking for, when I really really push… they struggle to define it and if there are several people in the room (or around the dinner table) they will disagree on final definitions.
We need to pay attention to Mitch Kapor’s maxim if we are going to generate a breakthrough in our thinking on talent. It is in all our interest to do so as the world changes and our organisations need to adapt. But it feels to me that first we need a new architecture of participation before we can even make a start. And perhaps it is the people who are adept at seeing systems and creating participative structures and process who form the real talent shortage.