Fracking leadership
Fracking leadership
I've had an interest in technology for as long as I can remember. I'm told I drew machines as a child when others drew flowers, animals and people. I’m talking about technology in the broadest of senses, everything from a manual tool such as a knife to the more abstract world of machine learning. It is a fascination I have with how to do stuff better, more intelligently or do entirely new stuff using technology.
This interest has followed me and remains a red thread throughout my work and spare time. Lately this has had me thinking a lot about what technology means for our very own Alumni slogan: Unleash Potential. Sounds all snazzy but what does it mean? Well, it would go to argue we are in the business of removing the obstacles for the full potential of X to come into fruition. For Alumni that X, would stand for people and organisations. So, when someone would ask me, “Unleash potential of what?”, the answer would be, unleash the potential of people and organisations. People form organisations and organisations allow people to achieve more than they would on their own. So another way of putting this slogan would be to say that we are in the business of removing the obstacles for the full potential of people and organisations to come into fruition.
“We are in the business of removing the obstacles for the full potential of people and organisations to come into fruition.”
Taking a tools and technology point of view to this monster of a sentence, there is a lot to bite into. What obstacles? Which people? What organisations? But there is one particular question that has preoccupied me lately:
What is "the full potential". And this is where it's time to get meta, because we are talking latent qualities that can be harnessed and developed for future success. The keywords are can, harnessed and developed. Thanks to technology, and the continuous development of technology, what constitutes latent qualities that can be harnessed and developed is continuously developing as well. Technology is about the art of the possible.
Let me give an example of what I am talking about from the fascinating world of oil drilling:
Oil drilling harks back farther than many may think. Back in the third century oil drilling was initially done using simple tools made of bamboo. Even if bamboo is a fantastic material, those tools and techniques only allowed for accessing the most accessible oil wells, closest to the surface. That said, an entrepreneurial oil driller of 3rd century China could well have extracted the full potential of each and every oil well. Much, much later Walter Trout invents the modern pumpjack, one of the most recognisable symbols of the modern oil industry. Again the Daniel Plainviews of the world could extract the full potential of the reservoirs of dinosaur squeezings mother earth had to offer. And so, you see where this is going. What constitutes the full potential is inherently dependent on the tools at hand.
And so, unleashing the potential of people and organisations is very much a matter of tools, technology and data. An interesting comparison can be made with another “soft science”, the marketing industry. Marketing has gone, and still goes, through a transformation from gut feel towards measurability. So should, and is, the field of recruitment. But as ever, change comes with concerns, some more grounded, some less.
This brings us back to our example of oil extraction. A widely discussed technique that has significantly increased the potential yield of oil reservoirs is that of hydraulic fracturing, fracking for short. Forgetting for the moment that the business of hydrocarbons is problematic in general, fracking as a technique, gets a lot of critique for its negative side effects on the environment. New ways of applying new technology will come with both foreseeable and unforeseeable side effects. Now, I identify as a techno-optimist, but I do want to raise the point that we need to be responsible in deploying new innovations also in our field. Applying AI and ML techniques such as look-alike modelling, fuzzy matching and predictive machine learning techniques to recruitment, assessments and predicting fit, comes with a lot of responsibility. We need to make sure we develop and use tech and techniques to identify, and indeed unleash, the full potential of people, while at the same time having the moral rigour, to set limits for responsible use of personal data, let alone mitigate the built-in risks of bias that trained models bring with them.
With these considerations in mind, let’s take a look at how we can leverage tech to get, not the most, but the best out of people, shall we?
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