Continuing to think about talent issues and been spending some time looking at the way in which the labour market and the education and training market work.

I am concluding that one of the key problems confronting organisations is that there is a very poor or weak connection between the actual work, the process of creating person specifications, the recruitment process and the induction and development process. Why? Many jobs - beyond the functionally limited or structurally insignificant (and indeed such roles are actually very few)-  are created in the doing of them and exist in many forms and are reinvented daily  in many different hearts and minds across an organisation. We know, for example, that organisation structure charts do not even closely match the reality of how an organisation functions (see work by Margaret Wheatley and Myron Rogers on the application of living systems theory to organisational design); we also know that job descriptions – those things that drive the person specification, the recruitment process and the hiring decision- are very rarely looked at again by anybody (including the postholder and their boss). The only time a JD get’s attention is at the hiring, appraising or firing stage as it serves a quasi-legal function and little more.

 These things matter because in the development of the logic of scarcity is the driving argument that ‘we cannot find what we are looking for’. Perhaps organisations are really confused about what they are looking for, perhaps a gap between what they say they want and what they actually need. What’s going on?

I believe that at the core of the problem of confusion about organisational requirements is an increasingly deeply held conviction that ‘talent’ is innate –it is either there or it isn’t. The origins of such a conviction are complex for sure but probably relate tightly to the instrumentalisation of our education and training systems. The instrumentalising of an essentially developmental process (learning) has created a widespread reductive mindset that has become politically pervasive. This has led to the complete nonsense of endless testing regimes in schools, can-do competency frameworks for skills training systems and a complete collapse in our understanding of what it is to engage in the process and practice of learning. Reducing learning to testing, confusing craftsmanship with competencies, limiting achievements to success in exams and valuing only particular forms of qualifications as credentials has led us to see a human beings capacity to learn as a process of administrative box ticking.

This reductive approach, a dumbing down of our learning systems, operates in a positive feedback cycle that winds the system down ever further reducing its capacity because our educators, teachers and trainers (and HR professionals and talent management experts) are increasingly produced by this instrumental system themselves. So we lock out a belief that through learning and development people can grow and change and become smarter, more adaptable, more savvy, more refined, more able. The dominant mindset is that someone has either got it or they haven’t. That’s how we explain to ourselves, for example, why it is fine to write off about 40% of schoolchildren who don’t get 5 grade A-C GCSE’s as ‘non-academic’ (they haven’t got it).

The gap between what we learn through a prescribed syllabus, what we are asked to do in a job as an employee and what we are able to do achieve as a human being are all very different by orders of magnitude.