Asking the Right Question?
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would use the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” Einstein
I’m super interested in why nobody really asks questions about language formation and identity outside the walls of academia. Moreover, it's such a shame that these central ideas around the development of a self and identity are not presented as forms of questioning for children to explore. How cool would it be if schools structured the question of how humans come to think of themselves as a self, as an important part of learning. Surely, learning in this way would be a bunch of fun and would quite literally accelerate the progress of how we identify and develop human capability. We have so many examples of these forms of questioning in the discourse of philosophy, psychoanalysis and critical theory, where endless reflective processes about human identification and behavioural selves, ergo - human effectiveness, are thrashed out on the silent shelves of university libraries (but they haven’t yet quite found their way out of academia and been translated into the marketplace).
After years of teaching, writing assessments, examining, managing examiners, and negotiating the hierarchies of clever people in academia, it could not be clearer that the shape of a human mind, and a sense of who we are and how we behave, is formed by the language inputs that we assign-assess-reassign-assess and then reassign (and assess). It could not be clearer that the status quo of identity formation and behavioural culture is the absorption of facts-as-they-have-been-told-or-modeled-to-us.
If we are in The-Future-of-Work/self-at-work pivot, or put more simply how identity and behaviour affects how humans work, then the tools that we use to measure, identify and develop human capability in the workplace need to be in a pivot too.
The psychological assessments developed by the American military in WW1 for effective troop deployment and adopted into the workplace through the 1950s Mercer et al. advertising that promoted the adoption military strategies to develop effective organisations, form the bedrock of assessment led ROI, but inevitably will start to (if they have not already) fall short in the identification, development and deployment the new self-at-work capabilities within the behavioural human capital ROI.
So what now? As we are hitting the glass ceiling on the value of legacy measurements in understanding the value of, and developing, this self-in-the-workplace, then we must effectively innovate to find new measurement methodologies that are capable of mapping and standardizing the complexity of the behavioural human capabilities that make up this self-at-work that we need to identify, develop and deploy.
Further, this rationale applies to the use of AI. Using AI to accelerate legacy human capability measurements will only serve to give legacy insight and analytics, no matter how shiny the AI dashboards. Worse, the self-validated (or manager validated - god help us) self-assessments that are populating behavioral, or soft skills, measurement gaps are accelerating the legacy of unconscious bias, although now beautifully accelerated through the use of AI.
The innovation in, and the development of, next gen language based human capability measurements, will be an AI gamechanger, especially in the Generative AI space, where, finally, we will see how standardised and validated behavioural skills data will be the new oil that drives conversational insight and analytics engines as the ethical AI assistants that they should be.
There has never been such a great opportunity to build a next gen HR Human capability measurement solution that can align HR thought leadership with the identification, development and deployment of human capital in equitable, diverse and inclusive ways. Innovation must be at the forefront of building measurement methodologies and tools that harness and activate this great opportunity to level the playing field, create fair and equal workplaces with appropriate pay. With these new solutions we will come to see the Josh Bersin world of “Human IP” development and how radically it will drive forward ROI in this future workplace.