Knowledge, judgment, and potential: the challenge of developing professionals when experience is no longer gained in the same way.
In the previous article in this series, Claudia Nieto invited us to examine the future of work through the changes reshaping professional opportunities, the skills required, and the decisions that both individuals and organizations must make. In this second installment, I want to explore a question that I consider decisive from the perspective of business consulting and corporate leadership: How are we preparing young people to take on responsibilities they have not yet had the opportunity to exercise?
Consider a first job. For years, many people learned by preparing reports, analyzing data, responding to requests, attending meetings, and solving everyday problems. These tasks may have seemed routine, but they also served as a practical learning environment: they allowed people to observe, make mistakes, receive feedback, understand customers, and develop sound judgment.
Today, some of these activities can be automated or accelerated through artificial intelligence. The question, therefore, is not simply which tasks will disappear or which jobs will emerge. It goes much deeper:
If we automate the tasks through which people traditionally learned how to work, where and how will future professionals learn to think, make decisions, and take responsibility?
Work Is Changing; So Must the Way We Learn to Do It
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that between 2025 and 2030, economic, technological, demographic, and environmental transformations will contribute to the creation of 170 million jobs and the displacement of 92 million, resulting in a projected net increase of 78 million jobs. The same report warns that approximately 39% of existing skills could change or become obsolete during this period (World Economic Forum, 2025).
These figures describe a labor market in transition, but they do not resolve the underlying challenge: newly created jobs will not automatically be filled by those who lose their previous positions. Between opportunity and effective contribution lies a gap in skills, experience, and judgment.
In Managers Not MBAs (2004), Henry Mintzberg challenges the idea that management simply consists of mastering tools and models. Management also requires reflection, an understanding of context, collaboration, and action. His argument is particularly relevant to young professionals: studying concepts is necessary, but it is not the same as knowing how to apply them when facing ambiguous situations, competing interests, and real consequences.
Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis argue that one of the most important leadership capabilities is judgment: the ability to make sound decisions when information is incomplete, time is limited, and the consequences matter. This capability develops through progressively challenging experiences involving responsibility and reflection, not merely through theoretical education.
Professional development cannot be limited to transferring knowledge. It must create opportunities to transform knowledge into judgment, action, and results.
The Organizational Paradox: Flatter Structures, Narrower Decision-Making Authority
In many organizations, knowledge has become more widely distributed. Today, more people can analyze information, understand performance indicators, participate in projects, and propose improvements. Quality methodologies, data analytics, process management, and interdisciplinary work have expanded the collective ability to solve problems.
We can observe this evolution in how organizations have approached problem-solving.
Initially, specialized knowledge was concentrated among experts who solved problems. Later, participation expanded so that more people could solve them. Subsequently, experts also began focusing on improving the system itself, and gradually, organizations sought to enable everyone to contribute to its improvement.
This sequence—which I propose as an evolutionary interpretation rather than a universal chronology—reflects an important shift: moving from correcting isolated failures to understanding and transforming the conditions that produce them.
Continuous improvement, process management, projects, data analytics, and innovation have expanded this capability. Today, it is no longer enough to ask who can solve a problem. We must also ask who can redesign the process, prevent the problem from recurring, and understand the impact of the solution on other departments, customers, and business results.
This evolution is connected to Russell L. Ackoff’s systems thinking: intervening in a system requires understanding the relationships between its components and the purpose it serves. Optimizing an activity in isolation may even worsen overall results if its effects on the rest of the system are not considered.
Yet a paradox emerges: while available knowledge increases, autonomy in decision-making does not always increase with it. Standardization, controls, approval workflows, and predefined system parameters can limit the scope of action available to middle managers and those beginning their careers. They are expected to show initiative but given little room to exercise it.
In Humanocracy (2020), Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini encourage organizations to reconsider management structures and practices that prioritize control over initiative and contribution. The question is not whether rules are necessary; they are. The question is whether our rules allow people to exercise judgment, learn, and respond with agility.
For young professionals, this contradiction is particularly significant. If they merely execute instructions, they may learn to follow procedures, but they are unlikely to develop the ability to recognize when those procedures fail to address the problem. And if they are never allowed to make decisions of progressively greater scope, how will we know whether they are ready for greater responsibilities?
It is not enough to demand autonomy: we must design work so that autonomy can be learned and exercised responsibly.
Knowing Is Not the Same as Understanding
One of the distinctions that interests me most in leadership development is the difference between knowing and understanding. We may be familiar with a methodology, explain a performance indicator, or repeat the steps of a process and still fail to understand what is happening, why it is happening, or what consequences a decision may have.
Russell L. Ackoff, a leading figure in systems thinking, emphasized the importance of examining systems in terms of their purposes and outcomes, rather than focusing solely on their components or activities. This perspective encourages us to move beyond management centered on completing tasks and instead ask what impact those tasks produce and how they contribute to the whole.
In practice, this means that a young professional should not simply learn how to prepare a report. They also need to understand who uses it, what decisions it supports, what risks it helps anticipate, and what could happen if the information is incomplete or misinterpreted. The goal is not to bypass operational work, but to learn it with a clear sense of purpose.
From a different perspective, Manfred Max-Neef argued that understanding requires becoming involved with what one seeks to understand. Something similar happens in the workplace: negotiation, leadership, or customer experience can be studied, but learning becomes deeper through participation, listening, confronting dilemmas, and reflecting on lived experiences.
This is why experience should not be understood simply as years of service. A person may repeat the same task for years without expanding their understanding. Experience becomes learning when it includes challenges, feedback, reflection, and application.
From Problem-Solving to Contribution: Understanding the Teleology of Work
A key capability for the future will be understanding not only what we do, but why we do it. In systems terms, this means examining the purpose and impacts of a process: its teleology.
Robert Kegan argues that many of today’s difficulties are not technical problems but adaptive challenges that require new ways of understanding reality. This calls for developing professionals who can interpret contexts, integrate perspectives, and act under uncertainty.
When a young professional is assigned a task, a leader can explain the steps and review the outcome. But the leader can do something more valuable: help connect that activity to the customer, the process, performance indicators, and the organization’s strategy. This is how strategic understanding begins to develop.
I propose that professionals in training should learn to answer five questions whenever they assume a responsibility:
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Purpose: What need or problem are we trying to address?
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Process: What activities and decisions make it possible to achieve the desired result?
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Impact: Who uses the outcome, and what changes because of it?
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Judgment: Which situations require interpreting, questioning, or adapting the procedure?
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Strategy: How does this work contribute to the organization’s objectives and capabilities?
These questions transform a task into a learning opportunity. They also help leaders evaluate more than task completion: they make it possible to observe whether individuals understand the system in which they work and whether they can improve their contribution.
Performance and Potential: Two Different Questions
This discussion has direct implications for career planning, succession, and promotion decisions. Many organizations use the nine-box matrix to assess performance and potential. The matrix can help structure discussions, but placing someone’s name in a box does not automatically make a decision more objective. Its quality depends on how the variables are defined, the evidence used, and the preparation of those conducting the assessment.
Performance and potential answer different questions. Performance asks: What results does the individual produce in their current responsibilities, and how do they achieve them? Potential asks: How prepared is the individual to assume responsibilities involving greater complexity, scope, or uncertainty? Someone may excel in their current position but not yet be ready to lead a department. Likewise, someone may demonstrate potential but still need further experience and development before being promoted.
Performance evaluation must move beyond relying exclusively on the manager’s perspective and the achievement of internal objectives. It should consider results, quality, behaviors, collaboration, and, especially, the impact that work generates for those who receive its products or services. When there is an external customer, their experience and assessment should be systematically incorporated. When the work is internal, feedback from the departments or individuals receiving the output of the process also matters. Customers do not need to evaluate every aspect of individual performance, but they should provide evidence regarding timeliness, quality, usefulness, reliability, and the value received.
In this way, evaluations can integrate multiple sources: results and performance indicators, self-assessment, leadership evaluation, feedback from colleagues and team members when appropriate, and the voice of the customer or process user. The objective is not to turn performance evaluation into a popularity contest, but to connect individual performance with the actual contribution it produces. The key question is no longer simply “Did the person complete the task?” but also “What impact did their work have, and for whom?”
Potential, on the other hand, requires a more rigorous, focused, and consistent assessment. From Euro Business Coach’s perspective, I propose examining it through three elements that should be analyzed both separately and together: intellectual capacity (IC), emotional intelligence (EI), and strategic understanding (SU). These are neither labels nor an automatic formula for making promotion decisions. Rather, they are dimensions that guide evidence collection and help prevent organizations from confusing an individual strength with the broader potential required for future responsibilities.
1. Intellectual Capacity (IC): The ability to understand information, identify patterns, learn, analyze problems, and manage increasing complexity. It is important to observe how an individual learns when facing unfamiliar situations, structures a problem, evaluates alternatives, and draws conclusions—not merely how much knowledge they have accumulated.
2. Emotional Intelligence (EI): The ability to recognize and regulate one’s emotions, understand others, manage disagreements, build relationships, and remain effective under pressure. It becomes evident in situations involving conflict, feedback, collaboration, and decisions that affect others.
3. Strategic Understanding (SU): The ability to connect decisions and job-related activities with organizational objectives, customer needs, interdependencies between departments, and business results. It involves understanding the purpose of a process, anticipating consequences, and distinguishing between optimizing a task and improving overall system performance.
These three dimensions should be explored through complementary evidence and methods: structured interviews about real experiences, critical incident analysis, project assignments, behavioral observation, multisource feedback, and performance reviews. Their relative importance may vary depending on the level and nature of the position, but no dimension should be taken for granted or automatically substituted by another.
In consulting practice, some unsuccessful promotions offer an important lesson: a decision may have overvalued technical ability while underestimating emotional intelligence, recognized strong interpersonal relationships without verifying strategic understanding, or assumed that intellectual agility guaranteed the ability to mobilize others. This is why potential should not be left to each evaluator’s intuition. It requires clear criteria, observable evidence, calibration among leaders, and development plans that allow assumptions to be tested before irreversible decisions are made.
The question is not only who demonstrates high potential today, but what evidence supports that assessment, what gaps they must close, and what experiences they need to be prepared for the next level.
Designing Jobs: Connecting Strategy, Departments, and Individual Roles
Talent development does not begin when a vacancy opens, nor does it end when a training session is delivered. To a large extent, it begins with organizational and job design. Many companies have integrated functions, grouped activities, or created cross-functional teams. However, integrating functions does not guarantee that work is well designed or that responsibilities are aligned with strategy.
Organizational design must connect three levels. At the organizational level, strategy defines the results and capabilities that must be developed. At the departmental level, responsibilities, the products or services delivered, and contributions to other departments and customers must be clearly established.
At the individual level, each position must have a clearly defined purpose, responsibilities, decision-making authority, required competencies, key relationships, and contribution indicators. When these levels are not aligned, duplication, gaps, conflicts of authority, and tasks whose value no one can explain begin to emerge.
This perspective aligns with the importance that Hackman and Oldham attributed to job design: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback influence people’s experiences and performance. For young professionals, this has a practical implication: their positions should allow them to understand a recognizable part of the process, identify whom their work serves, receive information about results, and gradually expand their autonomy.
Therefore, before redesigning a position or integrating functions, it is worth asking: What strategic outcome should it produce? What responsibility belongs to the department? Which decisions should remain within the individual role? What competencies does it require? Which other departments does it depend on? Who receives its product or service, and how will its impact be evaluated? A well-designed job is not simply a longer list of tasks; it is a clearly defined contribution within a system of work.
If the tasks that previously enabled learning no longer exist, who is redesigning jobs to develop the professionals organizations will need tomorrow?
When strategy, departmental responsibilities, and individual roles are aligned, work becomes a platform for learning. Individuals do not merely carry out activities: they understand the process, see the consequences of their decisions, and learn to improve the system. This is one of the most important challenges facing organizations that seek to develop new generations of professionals.
What Should Organizations Do to Develop Young Professionals?
If we accept that talent does not develop through courses alone, nor does it emerge spontaneously, organizations need to turn work into an environment for deliberate learning. This requires concrete decisions regarding leadership, organizational design, and Human Resources Management.
– Design entry-level positions that provide genuine learning opportunities. Automating routine tasks should not mean eliminating every opportunity to understand a process. Roles must be redesigned so that young professionals can observe, analyze, interact with customers, interpret results, and progressively take on challenges.
– Assign purpose-driven projects. Projects make it possible to connect activities, decisions, and outcomes. A well-designed challenge should have clear objectives, an appropriate scope, guidance, and opportunities to review what worked and what needs to change.
– Gradually expand autonomy. This does not mean assigning critical decisions without adequate preparation. It means progressively increasing decision-making authority, establishing clear boundaries, and providing feedback on the consequences.
– Strengthen mentoring and leadership dialogue. Leaders should explain the reasoning behind decisions, share their judgment, ask questions before providing answers, and help turn mistakes into learning opportunities. Amy Edmondson (2019) emphasizes the importance of creating conditions in which people can speak up, ask questions, and learn without fear of humiliation.
– Align performance, potential, and development. Performance evaluations should incorporate the impact on customers and process users. Potential assessments should explicitly examine intellectual capacity, emotional intelligence, and strategic understanding, using evidence and shared criteria. Development plans should address gaps through challenging experiences, and promotions should be based on evidence rather than simply seniority, visibility, or individual results.
– Teach ethics and responsibility. Artificial intelligence can generate convincing answers, but people remain responsible for verifying information, recognizing biases, protecting data, and assessing the human and organizational consequences of their decisions.
The challenge is not to protect young professionals from every difficulty, but to offer them challenges they can take on with appropriate guidance. Nor is it about idealizing experience: those who have worked for many years must continue learning as well. The responsibility to evolve is shared, although organizations have a particularly important ability to design the conditions in which that learning takes place.
The Future of Work Is Also a Leadership Decision
When we discuss the future of work, we tend to focus on emerging professions, digital skills, and artificial intelligence. All of these matter. But there is another, less visible and perhaps more decisive question: What kind of organization are we building so that people can develop and put their capabilities into practice?
If we reward only immediate results, we may sacrifice learning. If we demand innovation while punishing every mistake, we encourage excessive caution. If we ask for critical thinking but fail to listen to questions from those just starting their careers, we teach obedience. If we promote people solely based on their current results, we risk confusing technical excellence with leadership capability.
The future is not built simply by hiring talent. It is built through experiences that transform knowledge into judgment, judgment into decisions, and decisions into valuable contributions.
The question for leaders is not only what talent they will need to hire tomorrow. It is what talent they are helping to develop today.
Questions to Put into Practice
For young professionals: Are you simply seeking experience to secure a job, or are you seeking experiences that will help you develop judgment, understand the business, and expand your contribution?
For leaders: What decisions, projects, and conversations are you making available to those beginning their careers so that they learn to think rather than simply execute?
For Human Resources: Do our recruitment, evaluation, development, mobility, and succession processes identify and develop the potential our strategy will require?
And for organizations: Is the way we design work developing the professionals we will need in the future, or is it reducing their opportunities to become those professionals?
How Euro Business Coach Supports Organizations
At Euro Business Coach, we support business owners and executive teams in developing organizational and leadership capabilities by integrating strategy, leadership, competencies, culture, and management systems.
Our work aims to ensure that talent development does not depend solely on training initiatives, but becomes embedded in how jobs are designed, responsibilities are assigned, performance is evaluated, potential is identified, and future leaders are prepared.
Because the future of work is not built through new technologies alone. It is built by creating the conditions for people to learn, understand, make decisions, and contribute more effectively over time.
