You Cannot Out-Hire a System

The specialist once held the title. "We need people deep in a single vertical", they said. Then it was the generalist. "Find the people who can operate wide, across many verticals." At another point it may have been "Find design thinkers. They can be who we need." The archetypal leader figure of this season apparently holds capability buckets across four quadrants at once and it is "judgement" that fuses those buckets into this version of heroism. But of course it is.

One bucket is tool-making, with leverage no less. Another is the capacity to have a read on incentives, trust, power, and "the way an organisation actually moves." Interesting catchall here.

Next, they will innately have fluency in "what good looks like" across a dozen fields. And the same person also runs the finance, the risk, the quality, and the speed.

One person, translating every element and phenomenon of a living system into a tidy, packaged, sound call. Within a single human.

Imagine that purity.

This latest drawing is not a reasonable or accurate capability map. It attempts to proclaim the superhuman is coming with these skills, in these buckets, to usher in the next wave of organisational leadership.

No. He is not. And, it is yet another perpetuation of one of the biggest system lies. Look at the imaginary person and his deficits. Reimagine that person with every capability known to man. Do not look at the system doing the ridiculous imagining.

You will have seen any such instrument in its native habitat.

The job specification for the new hire who will hold the seam between the technology and the business, twelve capabilities listed, four of them in open contradiction, none of them the thing the role is actually short of.

The reorganisation that redraws the boxes and renames the lines and changes nothing about how a decision gets decided or how it travels.

The two-day gathering that ends with a competency model to place on the wall, and yet with the same meeting the following Monday.

Each performs a systemic point of view and then resolves it into a reductive set of qualities for an individual to attain inside a system unable to enable any one of them. "Holding two opposing pulls" at once gets written up as a rare skill for a person to hold. And yet, it is hardly a bullet point. It is a base human trait, what the mind and a body do organically, until that ability is flattened by school, religious, cultural, and workplace systems that value and reward for one answer. And fast.

So this heroic archetypal figure, holding all these skills across all these buckets and standing at the summit of achievement becomes the figure everyone points to. The collection of skills and capabilities that will pull the rest of us up the mountain after him. And, he is the least real manifestation. While everyone recognises him, no one has ever met him.

Why?

Because he is a caricature the organisation, and the people telling lies about systems work, keep drawing. They and you then keep hunting for him. People strain to become him. The hunt and the striving exhaust and exhaust in a forever search for the hire, the stellar review, and the miraculous delivery of results. Being and becoming a superhuman must be the path of leadership.

Complexity is a property of the system. Complexity is not a deficiency. Nor is complexity reducible to parts, without concurrently holding and understanding wholes.

A living organism, the organisation, is a weave of how decisions travel, how power moves, what the work rewards and how it flows, what goes unsaid and what goes said, and no individual, however gifted, folds that weave into a single body. And we unequivocally need to stop expecting him to arrive, to save us, and to do our work for us.

Any system produces what it rewards. Any system generally degenerates to reward what it can count.

Why? Because linearity, rationality, and quantitative factoring have been highly in fashion for a couple hundred years as "the way" to see, think, be, behave, and operate. And, because a person can be made countable. One name to promote, one name to blame, against a myopically ambitious and reductive accounting of skills and capabilities within a system design that will never allow them to bloom.

The way the natural system actually operates is not countable though. So the organisation reaches for the countable figure all over the place, and leaves the uncountable work untouched. Much easier to make work and be busy in the imaginary world of reducible peopling. Much harder to build systems that create the conditions for people to operate according to their natural and far superior capabilities. Meanwhile, the person who reads the whole and can gracefully hold opposing truths scores as slow, hard to place on a chart, and hard to score by lane. The one who is willing to play the more limited game, picks a lane, and defends it loudly to get rewarded and promoted.

The organisation calls the results, both positive and negative, capability alignments or gaps, per their illusionary and delusionary skills matrices.

We call it systems built on lies. Systems perpetuating control rather than power. Systems designed for imbalance rather than equilibrium. Systems committed to extraction instead of robustness. Systems collapsed into the false hero, not the collective, whole intelligence.

This illusion was already expensive. It is about to cost more.

The intelligence now moving into the work returns whatever it is given. At speed and with the authority of arithmetic. Overconfidence. Little qualitative reasoning.

When you feed the intelligence a system whose undercurrents nobody has made conscious, it hands that unconscious system back at scale. Its system defaults dressed as data. Its incoherence carrying a confidence score. And the "capability" lever the whole fantasy always ran on now slips.

The heroic, imaginary leader figure has historically been measured on output. Reducible, part not whole, quantifiable output.

How the parts weave together. Why the design is made that way. The read on what is true in a room. The call on conditions no one has met. The nerve to make a call, and stand behind it. How decisions get made, or do not.

The latest, already stale diagram is re-drawing the ideal worker for a game that is ending. Shortly, we will hear louder yelling, the figure drawn even harder as it ends.

Era change. Old archetypal patterns, people, and production leaving the building.

The work the latest drawing avoids is the only work that tangibly moves anything. Understand how the system actually operates, how it changes, the way it evolves, and build there. Build there through the intelligence of your unique system, made up of the collective of people holding a massive set of capabilities as a whole. Stop being in the delusion of the archetypal hero who embodies all the skills of everywhere and everyone coming to save your day. Or, your business.

The change industry mostly cannot see or hold these organic truths.

Why?

It sells systems change. Usually then delivers a technical install. A leader in its matrix proclaims transformation over the top. Everyone else rolls their eyes. Eventually you hear about all the complaints and cynicism about change failures, because the "uncountable" phenomena, the truth of the system, have not budged.

Drawing and defining a superhuman, with judgement at his core, to carry this day is an anathema. Understand it as what change practices reach for when they do not effectively know how to change systems.

Do many humans need to be intentional, courageous, and focused to alter the consciousness state of a system so it changes? Certainly.

Is it that a single figure is coming to carry a living system on their own through these transformative moments and era shifts rolling on shore so fast? That will always be the story told and drawn as a pretty diagram to keep the truth about systems, intelligence, and actual capability out of view.

The reductive diagram wants you to believe it as a hiring act. A heroic leader archetype find. Or, better yet a myth that you are not thinking right.

It is less legible than a hire and less tangible than your countable beans. It moves both fast and slow. And right now is the whole game.

You want to build the conscious, understood systems (not individual) container before the intelligence pours through it. You want to imagine a shared architecture of understanding made by the people across the system. This way, the thing the machine runs through is coherent, clear, and worth building on.

Judgement held in the overall system, operating design, and the collective of people, not in one exhausted, heroic, imaginary body holding all the seams magically, and alone.