The war for talent is now a war for intelligence

Firstly, this post is not a primer on how to build your own secret service (CIA, MI6, FSB etc), though there are parallels. Intelligent organisations, in my opinion, are very attuned to their environments and adapt homeostatically. Process-driven organisations regard their environment as a static backdrop,where disruptions, ie reality, are treated as exceptional, and thus inconvenient events. 

In any case, cognition fuels intelligent organisations and it comes in two forms:

• Natural (people)

• Artificial (tech). 

Thanks to the arrival of AI, the much referenced war for talent (McKinsey & Co.) is now a war for intelligence. Be on the winning side in this war by embracing the following five approaches:

Trait – The new skill

Avoid recruiting for skills, unless you have an enduring and specific need, eg. brain surgeon (hospital), cyber security specialist, painter (Severn Bridge). Of course you can hire ‘disposable’ contractors. The best return will be in recruiting those who are quick to learn and do not have ossified career notions. 

3H

Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi believed that for learning to be valuable it needed to embrace head, heart and hands. Mapping it on to my Intelligent Organisation model:

Head (IQ) – Can potential recruiters demonstrate rationality, particularly when under pressure. Are they able to distinguish between facts, truth, opinion and advertising. Can they make decisions without having the requisite data (eg. applying Occam’s Razor). Whilst higher education is not in itself a measure of intelligence, the sciences and the humanities tend to develop circumspect graduates.

Heart (EQ) – Look for people who have life stories that one would not expect to find on a CV but increasingly see paraded in LinkedIn posts. Challenging upbringings and exposure to extreme stress come to mind. For example, early exposure to violence tends to develop people who are hyper-sensitive to their environment, including the impact of what they say on other people. These people can become your organisation’s sensors.

Hand (PQ) – Engaging with one’s environment is what makes the difference. Rationalising the rage from a fellow drinker in a crowded bar who has gone from stranger to shover in a matter of seconds is not enough. Action is required. So we need people who are focused on executing and in particular delivering / shipping rather than obsessing over perfection. In an increasingly disruptive world each output is an experiment. Your organisation’s survivability is proportional to its experimentation velocity. BTW P equals physical.

AI

AI, and tech in general, is a key element of building an intelligent organisation. Much nonsense is written in respect of AI, including the wisdom in being polite when asking Chat-GPT questions, given its purported rate of evolution coupled with its good memory. Today, for most organisations of any size, job number one is getting your data act together, which means getting your systems integration act together.

The bigger picture

Given this article’s focus distribution in respect of people and tech you might conclude that I am some sort of humanist Luddite. This is not so. Both have an important role to play. My view is that we are overcooking AI and undervaluing people. This has been the case since the Agricultural Revolution.

Undoing over ten thousand years of ingrained behaviour will of course require more than one article. Intelligent leaders will hopefully infer that they are sitting on a cognitive goldmine. By taking a more enlightened approach to talent management, they will unearth significant value for all stakeholders.

On reflection, the secret service sector might be on to something.

This article also appeared in the Intelligent Organisation newsletter on LinkedIn.