HR Hub · 2026
The Science of
Who's Next
Everything we've learned about why some leaders thrive in complexity while others derail. And why we built a measurement system to put 100 years of research into practice.
Everything we've learned about why some leaders thrive in complexity while others derail. And why we built a measurement system to put 100 years of research into practice.
Over the past two years we've been deep in the research and practice of psychometric assessment, specifically around one question: what actually predicts whether someone will succeed when the world around them changes?
What we've learned surprised us, challenged some of our assumptions, and ultimately led us to build a tool we genuinely believe changes how HR can make talent decisions. This is what we want to share with you today.
Three strands of research. One powerful conclusion. And a practical framework you can use regardless of whether you ever work with us on it.
In the early 1900s, the psychologist Charles Spearman noticed something curious. Children who were good at maths were usually also good at history, music, and language. The correlation was too consistent to be coincidence.
He proposed a radical idea. A single underlying general factor, which he called "g", a universal cognitive engine that drives performance across all mental tasks.
One invisible construct, measurable through many observable tasks, predictive across domains. This became the foundation of modern intelligence research.
Fast forward 80 years. Researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership studied why some middle managers who had been identified as high-potential became successful C-suite executives, while others catastrophically derailed.
The derailed ones often had the most impressive technical track records. The skills that had made them excellent managers (deep expertise, hands-on control, confident decision-making) became fatal at the executive level.
The ones who succeeded shared one trait. They could let go of the old and latch onto the new. In 2000, researchers gave this ability a name: Learning Agility.
Lombardo & Eichinger (2000); McCall, Lombardo & Morrison, The Lessons of Experience (1988)
In 2022, Kenneth De Meuse published a paper in the Consulting Psychology Journal proposing something bold. That learning agility may function as the g-factor of leadership.
Just as Spearman's "g" is the universal engine that drives cognitive performance across any thinking task, learning agility appears to be the universal engine that predicts leadership success across any unpredictable, complex, or first-time business environment.
Here's where it gets interesting. Every five years the World Economic Forum surveys over a thousand employers worldwide about what skills will matter most in the coming years.
When we looked at the comparison between their 2020 and 2025 reports, we saw the academic research from De Meuse show up in real-world employer demand. It was the moment we knew this wasn't just theory.
World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2020 & 2025
De Meuse identified three factors that together produce leadership potential. The critical insight: they're multiplicative, not additive. If any factor is zero, the whole equation collapses.
The "Right Stuff" isn't one trait, it's three. All three must be present for leadership potential to exist. And the third one, dark-side traits, is what tends to derail even the brightest executives.
In 2012, Dries and colleagues studied managers across seven organisations and asked: what actually distinguishes people classified as high-potential from those who aren't? The results are striking.
Performance tells us what someone has done. Learning agility tells us what they'll do when the rules change. The authors called it "the overriding criterion for separating high potentials from non-high potentials."
Here's one of our favourite findings from this body of research. Tasha Eurich's large-scale study of self-awareness found that:
Which means that roughly 80% of the leaders we meet believe they see themselves clearly, but don't. And De Meuse identifies self-awareness as the single most important facet of learning agility. He calls it the gatekeeper, because without it, no other development is possible.
The interesting part? The areas where you most need self-awareness are, by definition, the areas you can't yet see. That's why reflection alone doesn't fix it. Structured feedback does.
Eurich (2018). What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It). Harvard Business Review.
Dai & De Meuse (2021) organised learning agility into a clean 3×3 framework: three domains of learning × three components of agility.
The three questions that matter for every person you lead: Can they do it? (Ability) · Do they want to? (Motivation) · Do they actually do it under pressure? (Application)
Dai & De Meuse (2021). Learning agility and the changing nature of leadership. Oxford University Press.
You can hire the most learning-agile people in the world. But if your culture punishes risk-taking, rewards consensus over candour, and treats failure as career death, then learning agility has nowhere to go.
Culture is the environment in which learning agility either thrives or dies. Which means the real question isn't just "do we have learning-agile people?" It's "does our culture allow learning agility to express itself?"
Whether or not you ever formally measure learning agility, four actions turn this research into practice:
Everything we've shared with you today is research you can use regardless of whether you ever work with us. But after two years of being deep in it, we came to a simple conclusion.
Knowing the framework isn't the same as having a way to measure it. And without measurement, "high-potential" stays an unlabelled feeling in the room, which research consistently shows is biased, inconsistent, and often wrong.
So we built the Agility Quotient: a psychometric assessment system that measures all nine facets, identifies derailment risks, and produces three different reports tailored to three different audiences. That's what the appendix on the next few slides covers, if you're curious.
The same underlying assessment produces three distinct outputs. Each designed for a specific reader and a specific decision.
The candidate report is designed to be given directly to the person, including a personal workbook. Here's a sample page from Anna Berger's report.
Circle the answer that best describes you today. Be honest, not aspirational.
The heart of every report: nine facets, three domains, banded scores. This is what a manager, coach, or HR lead sees first.
Selection reports add a cognitive-weighted Readiness Score and a traffic-light recommendation calibrated to the seniority of the role.
The report then walks the hiring panel through targeted interview questions ("Tell me about a time you needed to influence without formal authority") with "what to listen for" guidance, and a 90-day onboarding plan tailored to this candidate's specific profile.
Thank you for spending the hour with us.