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“Talentivity”: how to break the paradigms of talent“I’ve never been able to figure out if having a Nobel Prize slip out from under your nose at the age of twenty-five is something to be told with pride or rather one of those slightly shameful secrets that would be better forgotten.” It’s curious to hear this confession from someone who actually won the Nobel Prize, more or less fifty years later. This is how Giorgio Parisi tells his story, just a few days after the awarding of the international prize last December 6 “for innovative contributions to our understanding of complex systems and the discovery of the interaction between disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from the atomic to the planetary scale”. A theory seemingly incomprehensible to humans but that in the end, with an almost disarming simplicity, Parisi shows us to be accessible and understandable to all, simply by looking up at the sky and getting lost “in a flight of starlings”, as the title of his latest book reveals. Proud tale or slightly shameful secret? His choice – and definitely ours as well – falls on the first one and since “the story is tasty”, Parisi prefers to tell us how his path of research and discovery was formally sealed by the prize in a later phase of his life, opening up to new paths and possibilities.
VUCA is no longer with us.
A Nobel Prize at 73 years old, tasty discoveries, order and disorder of complex systems. There seems to be a common thread in the systemic reading of these phenomena, all part of the broad field of social physics, or the positive study (in the philosophical-experiential sense of the term) of the set of fundamental laws that govern social phenomena. Social phenomena that are grafted into a context that we like to call “augmented VUCA”, because VUCA is no longer enough for us. It is no longer enough for us to capture the circular interaction between the atomic scale and the planetary scale, back and forth. It is no longer enough for us because a system is increasingly necessarily an ecosystem. It is no longer enough for us where we are called to consider our degree of action, reaction and empowerment at unlimited boundaries, unbounded indeed. This is how suddenly our dear old VUCA abandons us to stretch, expand, extend. Welcome VUCA. Volatile, uncertain, unlimited, complex, ambiguous.
If complexity becomes unlimited, rethinking old and new paradigms is the right thing to do. Even those about talent. Parisi’s story teaches us this, as does the practice and observation of what is happening in organizational contexts. The concept and expression of talent becomes multidimensional, in time and space. The time factor of talent fascinates us a lot, not in a generational sense but in a continuous sense. For years, the concept of talent has been linked to age, and for years, as the Center of Excellence for Human Capital at BIP, we have been trying to free it from an outdated cage, that of age, opening up to a dimension of a perennial plant in which “perennials” have no age or defined functions in which to place and self-limit themselves. All this discourse cannot but be linked to the talent space factor. The unbounded context requires action and reflection beyond our reference system. It becomes fluid, multiform, multiverse until it becomes an ecosystem capable of generating a continuous spillover of resources, skills and experiences between the individual and the organization. I am deeply convinced that more than talent management tout court, organizations should now focus on the development of their own talent, a term we coined to indicate the ability to model and model talent as an attribute no longer individual but organizational characterized by timelessness, bi-directionality, collectivity, distribution (Fig. 1).
Multiple talents, multiple intelligences
As it appears to us, that of talent is a multifaceted and multipotential theme. In a sort of conditioned reflex, multipotentiality immediately calls to mind the field of multiple intelligences which implies the possibility that intelligence is plural, evolutionary and expansible. There was a time, however, when the idea that intelligence was singular and fixed was preeminent in the field of learning and development. It took David Perkins, co-director of Harvard’s Project Zero, and his “Theory 1” to show us just the opposite and how in fact we can talk about intelligence as “learnable intelligence”.
Perkins boldly developed a powerful new theory of intelligence that describes it as three-dimensional, because an attribute that is not genetically fixed but can be taught. In an attempt to extrapolate and summarize the essence of this theory, learnable intelligence is that combination of experiential intelligence and reflective intelligence, with the main premise that we can learn to think and act more intelligently. Three important mechanisms underlie learnable intelligence for the scholar: neural intelligence, experiential intelligence, and reflective intelligence. Simplifying the concept, we could imagine learnable intelligence as a PC that has its own hardware (neural intelligence), its own operating system (reflective intelligence) on which new programs are continuously loaded (experiential intelligence). What does it mean to build, liberate, and potential talent in organizations if not to work on all of this? By working with and on organizations, we wanted to give an organizational interpretation of Perkins’ vision, experimenting with how learnable intelligence is not only to be found in the individual but also in the context, and it is indeed the latter that becomes an enabling condition for the emergence and continuous flowering of talent
The case: on the road to Talentivity
Strengthening the ability to understand and manage market disruption by developing an entrepreneurial mindset in order to build a community of change makers oriented towards anticipation, innovation and continuous change: this is the guiding objective of the “U Lab 2020” project, which has seen the construction of four sites useful for the contextual development of individuals and organizations. In addition to targeted executive coaching sessions and inspirational workshops created to welcome significant and divergent testimonials, the job shadowing activity and the interactions within the “social impact laboratory” were key elements for the emergence of the talent. In particular, the methodology of job shadowing – observing, learning, experimenting “in others’ shoes” in order to eventually lead back to one’s own professional daily life – and the role of sharing through storytelling have made it easier to acquire new skills observed in execution rather than explained. In this sense, concretely, the front line of the company has joined their “peers” from other companies, carefully observing their work, sharing similarities and differences. The sharing of experiences made it possible to instill and maintain in the participants a level of energy and engagement such as to trigger a process of self-powered learning whose effects are still visible today in the organization and have affected, by contamination, other organizational areas thanks to the action of the participants able to act and affect as agents of change. Furthermore, the experimentation of the dynamics within the Social Impact Lab has been an opportunity for the project to exchange, share and support the development of ideas and projects with external organizations belonging to different sectors. Entirely conceived and designed to be carried out in digital mode, the Lab had the objective of creatively fertilizing, promoting a mutual exchange with the external realities involved and actively working on projects whose meta-objective was the development of key skills for the organization such as vision and systemic thinking, evolutionary mindset, emotional intelligence and authenticity, communication and leadership for continuous change. An experience of “emotional involvement that goes beyond the business objective – in the words of one of the participants in the project – in which learning to look at problems from several points of view and learning to do so for a reality different from one’s own was the real winning move”.
From the micro to the macro. Our 4I4T Model for Talentivity
The reflection on one’s own why, the continuous relationship between action and reflection, the openness towards unbounded boundaries, the mechanisms of synergistic exchange between the person and the ecosystem have characterized the project experience and generally constitute the distinctive traits of our way of conceiving and developing talent and talentiveness within organizations.
We have tried to model the main guidelines of the strategic design of our interventions on talent by recalling the evidence drawn from field practice and the attributes of Perkins’ learnable intelligence reinterpreted from an organizational perspective. The result is the framework 4I4T – Four Intelligences for Talents – which aggregates the two polarities of neuronal/experiential intelligence and reflective/learning intelligence in an ecosystem context of “unbounded boundaries” characterized by pull (pull from the ecosystem) and push (push towards the ecosystem) tensions that give rise to four strategic “movements” for the development of talent (fig. 2, circular strategy to be read counterclockwise):
- push-outside movement (cross-neuronal-learning intelligence): I submit myself to an external push out of my organizational context to expose myself to learning experiences that continuously reinforce my cognitive system of reference, allowing me to actively contribute to the growth of the ecosystem in which I act
- push-inside movement (intersection of neuronal and reflective intelligence): the development of my cognitive system is continuously and methodically exposed to moments of internal push characterized by a deep individual reflection on learning experiences that allow me to metabolize them to transform them into regenerated knowledge and cultivate my progressive development
- pull-inside movement (intersection of experiential and reflective intelligence): I constantly reflect on learning experiences by pulling in situations and contexts outside my usual environment and coming from the ecosystem whose observation helps me to look at reality and myself in a different way
- pull-outside movement (intersection of experiential-learning intelligence): the experiential nature of learning allows me to pull out of the ecosystem elements, insights and concrete projects that predispose me to be the bearer of initiatives for innovation and development of the ecosystem itself.
A circular approach, through two opposing tensions between pulling and pushing that fuel four movements for the strategic development of talent in organizations. After all, movement is the only way to stay in balance, Einstein said. And yes, even he didn’t get the Nobel Prize at 25.