Over the last month or so I have spent a substantial amount of time putting together a thought leadership presentation and writing a white paper dealing with talent management analytics.
The presentation, which outlines a crawl, walk, run approach to getting to “strategic” talent management analytics, was delivered a couple of weeks ago to a highly engaged and interested crowd of functional HR and HRIS professionals.
To my surprise and amusement, one of the points that really resonated with people was the idea of validity and reliability in measuring talent (and how boss-only ratings using a Likert scale consistently do not yield reliable data).
It was actually a piece of the presentation that I had been reluctant to include, as my experience with HR professionals is that they often become overwhelmed by the topic of analytics – period – even without mention of all of the considerations that go into generating sound analytics.
Yet, analytics are meaningless without reliable data to back them up, and this was clearly not lost on the attendees.
Since the session, I have started reading Nassim Taleb‘s Fooled by Randomness. It’s a fabulous book – one that will make you feel so foolish about your ignorance of probability that you will rethink all of your heretofore assumptions about life and decision-making.
Toward the end of the text, Taleb makes the same point that I proffer above, but much more eloquently than I ever could. He says:
“Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the ruler’s reliability (in probability called the prior), the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.”
Indeed.
Would love to read the whitepaper, as this is a pet theme of mine.
(actually two themes, one Taleb’s writings and two HR analytics)
I’m enjoying your blog, here are some of my ramblings on the topics…
http://theotherthomasotter.wordpress.com/2007/0
7/11/fooled-by-randomness-black-swans-donkeys-and-turkeys/
and
Sorry for the late comment, Mike, but your post is spot on. FBR is a terrific book, filled with excellent stories that flesh out the thinking. I am also eager to read your whitepaper. Check out “How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business” by Hubbard, which I mentioned in my post related to this subject: