The Brave New World of Talent Analytics?
“No social stability without individual stability.”
A quick opinion piece for today’s blog…
Bias is a millstone around our necks. Every question we pose, every demand for information, every observation we make is based on existing knowledge and previous experience, or bias. We know this bias exists, but what can we, are we willing to, do about it? Are you aware of your biases? Are you aware of unconscious bias? Are you ready for a computer to tell you? Are you ready for a computer to determine your future?
Big Data is beginning to touch all aspects of our lives. More than this, Big Data is about to have an increasing influence upon how we live our lives.
We live in a talent driven knowledge economy where organisations “buy” or “lease” people and they want low risk investment - welcome to the world of predictive talent analytics. Careers/lives are about to be shaped in weird and wonderful ways, where your connections, your communications with those connections and their connections, can be analysed to determine your current and potential value to an organisation. What you do not know about yourself, a computer will know.
The future, our demand, is a world of one-size-fits-one service solutions, where the individual can then be analysed and grouped. Quite a dichotomy, huh. But is there anything new here? Leaders/HR experts have sought to predict human behaviour for an age now, but are you an individual or part of a four group personality/talent test collective? Looking to the future, are you ready for a computer to determine your life? For many of you, personality tests, whether valid or not, have alreadydone just this - rejected/accepted for not being in the "right" box. You are lauded for your individuality, but constrained as an individual in a box with others just like you.
In 1931 Aldous Huxley saw a Brave New World, it seems like the only question for the future is whether you are an Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta or Epsilon? Speaking for myself, I enjoy being an outlier, a disruptor and consciously unpredictable - try getting your head around that one :) I am an agent of my own destiny and I do not conform to someone else’s idea/algorithm for my life.
I’ll leave the last word to Huxley (p. 70):
“The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. Consider the matter dispassionately...and you will see that no offense is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behavior.”
