Human potential does not add up
An organization can bring together remarkably competent people and remain unable to fully mobilize their collective potential.
It can count on experienced managers, recruit recognized talent, invest in training and have considerable resources, while experiencing persistent difficulty collaborating, making decisions or evolving its practices.
This observation raises a fundamental question.
How can we explain that the sum of individual capabilities does not necessarily produce an equivalent collective capability?
We have grown used to approaching human development through the characteristics and competencies of individuals. We seek to identify their strengths, close their skill gaps and develop the behaviors that will allow them to contribute better.
This approach remains essential. People’s knowledge, skills and judgment directly influence their capacity to carry out their responsibilities.
It is not enough, however, to explain what happens when these people must act together.
A competency can be present without being mobilized. Expertise can be recognized without being consulted. An idea can be relevant without finding the space it needs to be expressed. Learning can be real without ever transforming the organization’s practices.
Between what a person is capable of doing and what an organization manages to accomplish collectively, several conditions come into play.
Relationships. Structures. Responsibilities. Decision-making mechanisms. Opportunities for learning. Explicit and implicit expectations. The way contributions are recognized and brought into relation.
These dimensions form an environment in which human capabilities can develop, express themselves, complement one another or remain underused.
It is this environment that we propose to examine as an ecosystem.
Such a perspective changes our understanding of organizational development. It invites us to consider human capabilities as living resources whose value also depends on their opportunity to interact, to circulate and to contribute to something that goes beyond the individual.
For the real issue does not lie solely in developing new competencies.
It also concerns the way an organization transforms the capabilities it has into collective possibilities for action and evolution.
Having a capability does not guarantee its expression
We generally assess human capabilities on the basis of what a person knows, has mastered or demonstrates in certain situations.
This reading makes it possible to appreciate their experience and potential. It remains partial when it is used to anticipate how this person will act in a given environment.
Take the example of a manager recognized for her autonomy and judgment.
In an organization where responsibilities are clear and where she has real room to maneuver, she can make decisions, adjust her interventions and contribute actively to improving practices.
Place this same person in an environment where decisions are regularly called into question, where responsibilities overlap and where every initiative must receive several approvals.
Her knowledge and experience remain the same.
Her behavior could nonetheless change.
She could hesitate more, seek additional validation or limit her initiatives in order to reduce the risks associated with her decisions.
We might then conclude that she lacks autonomy.
Another interpretation deserves consideration: the environment in which she works may no longer allow her to mobilize her autonomy in the same way.
This distinction directly influences the solutions we favor.
When we systematically attribute the difficulties we observe to individual shortcomings, we risk multiplying development interventions without examining the conditions that limit their effects.
Research on self-determination theory offers a relevant perspective.
In their 2017 review of the literature, Edward Deci, Anja Olafsen and Richard Ryan examine the role of three basic psychological needs in the work context: autonomy, competence and relatedness.
The studies they review establish links between the satisfaction of these needs, the quality of motivation, well-being and functioning at work.
This research does not mean that the environment entirely determines individual behavior. It is rather a reminder that motivation and the expression of capabilities are influenced by social and organizational conditions.
A person remains responsible for their choices and their behavior.
The organization nonetheless helps define the concrete possibilities open to them.
Training a person to delegate, to communicate or to make decisions can produce significant learning. Management practices, decision-making mechanisms and organizational expectations must still allow that learning to take shape.
Developing a capability and creating the conditions needed for its expression are two distinct dimensions.
Their coherence influences what becomes possible.
Human capabilities work interdependently
Our way of thinking about professional development often rests on a classification of competencies.
We distinguish communication, collaboration, judgment, courage, emotional intelligence, autonomy and adaptability.
This organization makes learning easier. It makes it possible to target needs and design suitable interventions.
In reality, these capabilities are rarely mobilized independently.
A difficult conversation offers an illustration.
To address a delicate situation, a person sometimes has to recognize their own reactions, understand the issues, distinguish facts from their interpretations, consider the other person’s point of view and determine what they want to accomplish.
They must also choose their words, regulate their emotions and remain present enough to adjust their intervention to what emerges from the exchange.
Communication is the visible part of a much larger process.
A difficulty with regulation can compromise listening. Incomplete understanding can lead to a clumsy intervention. A lack of courage can prevent a necessary conversation. An excessive desire to preserve the relationship can make it difficult to express a limit.
Conversely, developing one capability can enrich the expression of several others.
Learning to recognize one’s reactions can improve listening. More attentive listening can transform the understanding of a situation. That understanding can lead to different choices and gradually change the quality of relationships.
These interactions reveal an important property of human development.
A capability can develop individually, but its reach often depends on the way it enters into relation with other capabilities.
This interdependence partly explains why some training produces limited effects despite the quality of the learning achieved.
A person can master a communication technique and struggle to use it when a situation becomes emotionally demanding.
They can understand the principles of delegation without managing to apply them when their relationship to control, their trust in others or their leadership’s expectations remain unchanged.
Lasting development requires more than acquiring knowledge.
It requires integrating that knowledge into real situations, in contact with other capabilities and with constraints that are sometimes contradictory.
An experience can reveal a limit that had been invisible until then. A relationship can transform an understanding. A decision can open new possibilities for learning.
Capabilities thus develop through a continuous movement of adjustment.
The human ecosystem begins to take shape in this interdependence.
The collective has properties that go beyond individuals
The interdependence of capabilities becomes more complex when several people must act together.
A team does not automatically have a great collective capability because its members individually possess high levels of competence.
It must also be able to coordinate their contributions.
Imagine a team made up of experienced specialists.
Each one has mastered their field. The knowledge is present. The resources exist.
Yet decisions are made without consulting certain kinds of expertise. Information circulates late. Disagreements are avoided. Responsibilities remain ambiguous.
The individual competencies are real.
The way they are brought into relation remains insufficient.
Conversely, a team able to recognize expertise, share relevant information, confront its interpretations and coordinate its decisions can reach possibilities that go beyond those of each of its members.
This collective capability does not appear spontaneously.
It develops in the practices, relationships and mechanisms that allow individual contributions to meet.
The quality of the collective thus depends on two complementary realities: the capabilities present and the conditions that allow their coordinated mobilization.
An organization can invest in the first while neglecting the second.
It then risks having more potential than it actually manages to use.
Relationships can support or limit development
Relationships are one of the spaces in which human capabilities reveal themselves most clearly.
We develop our understanding of others by entering into relationship with them. We learn to collaborate by encountering different perspectives. We refine our judgment when our interpretations are confronted with new information.
These interactions can enrich individual and collective capabilities.
They can also limit them.
In her research on psychological safety, Amy Edmondson looked at the conditions under which team members can take certain interpersonal risks, such as asking questions, acknowledging a mistake or voicing a concern.
Her 1999 study, conducted with 51 teams in a manufacturing company, brought to light an association between psychological safety and collective learning behaviors.
This research does not allow us to conclude that psychological safety guarantees performance.
It nonetheless underlines that learning together sometimes requires making visible information that people might otherwise prefer to conceal.
In a team where asking for help risks being interpreted as weakness, certain difficulties remain hidden.
When disagreements are systematically perceived as signs of opposition, useful perspectives may never be expressed.
If acknowledging a mistake mainly exposes a person to blame, the organization risks losing an opportunity to understand its causes and adjust its practices.
These dynamics can set in without any explicit intention to do harm.
They are built gradually through experiences, reactions and shared expectations.
Their influence goes beyond relational comfort.
They change the organization’s access to the information it needs in order to learn.
Relationships can thus become mechanisms of development or mechanisms of restriction.
It would be naive, however, to assume that the quality of relationships is enough to guarantee collective effectiveness.
A team can maintain harmonious relationships while avoiding the conversations it needs to have. It can preserve a pleasant climate at the expense of clear responsibilities or professional standards.
Relational capability is therefore not measured solely by the absence of tension.
It also shows in the possibility of dealing with disagreements, examining mistakes and maintaining clear expectations without systematically compromising trust.
A human ecosystem that favors development must allow people to support one another, question one another and hold one another accountable.
These three dimensions can coexist.
Their balance requires continuous attention.
When individual learning becomes an organizational resource
An organization does not transform automatically because its employees learn.
This distinction is one of the most important issues in organizational development.
A person can discover a more effective method, develop a new understanding or solve a complex problem.
If this learning remains limited to their personal experience, its organizational reach can remain fragile.
It risks disappearing when they change positions, leave the organization or stop taking part in the activities concerned.
For this learning to contribute to collective capability, it must be able to circulate.
It can be shared, discussed, adapted, integrated into practices or passed on to other people.
Research on organizational learning helps us better understand this passage.
In a review published in 2011, Linda Argote and Ella Miron-Spektor propose a framework in which organizational experience interacts with context to produce knowledge.
Their approach brings out the importance of the processes through which knowledge is created, retained and transferred.
Argote’s work on knowledge transfer takes this reflection further by examining the mechanisms and conditions that make it easier for knowledge to circulate between the units of an organization.
This research invites us to distinguish several realities that we sometimes confuse.
A person may have learned.
A team may have benefited from that learning.
The organization may, or may not, have developed a new lasting capability.
Take the example of a manager who considerably improves the way she delegates.
She clarifies expectations further, adapts her support and allows the members of her team to take on new responsibilities.
The effects can be significant in her immediate environment.
But what happens if these practices are never shared with the other managers? If recognition mechanisms continue to value individual control above all? If organizational processes remain designed around centralized decisions?
This manager’s learning is real.
Its contribution to organizational capability nonetheless remains partial.
For a practice to become a collective resource, it sometimes has to be made visible, the conditions of its success understood, and others allowed to make it their own.
This does not mean that all behavior should be standardized.
Contexts and people differ. A practice that works in one team may need significant adaptation elsewhere.
The issue is to create opportunities for transfer and learning.
This transformation can take several forms: exchanges between managers, feedback mechanisms, communities of practice, co-development processes or adjustments to ways of doing things.
None of these arrangements guarantees organizational development on its own.
Their value depends on what they actually make it possible to understand, pass on and transform.
Collective learning therefore does not lie simply in the quantity of information shared.
It appears when that information becomes usable and gradually changes the possibilities for action.
Contribution: the passage from potential to collective value
The development of human capabilities is often presented as an end in itself.
We want people to become more autonomous, more aware, more competent or better able to collaborate.
These objectives have intrinsic value.
In an organization, however, another question deserves to be asked.
What becomes of these capabilities when they are put to the service of a contribution?
This question makes it possible to distinguish three dimensions of development.
The first concerns the capability possessed.
A person has knowledge, skills, resources or an understanding that potentially allow them to act.
The second concerns the capability mobilized.
This person manages to use their resources in a concrete situation, despite the constraints and demands they encounter.
The third concerns contribution.
The action produces a useful effect for another person, a team, a decision, a practice or a collective objective.
These dimensions are linked, but they are not equivalent.
Expertise can exist without being called upon.
It can be mobilized without being brought into relation with the needs of the collective.
It can also produce an important contribution without that contribution being immediately visible or recognized.
Consider an employee who has an in-depth understanding of clients’ needs.
This knowledge is a capability.
When she uses it to resolve a complex situation, she mobilizes this capability.
When she shares what she has understood and helps improve a practice that will allow her colleagues to respond better to similar situations, her learning takes on a collective reach.
The contribution then goes beyond individual execution.
It enriches the possibilities for action of others.
This distinction opens an important reflection on performance.
We frequently measure what people produce: results achieved, objectives met, activities completed.
These measures remain necessary.
They do not, however, always make visible the contributions that allow the system to work better.
A manager who develops their team’s autonomy can gradually reduce the team’s dependence on them.
A person who shares critical knowledge can allow several colleagues to make better decisions.
A team that improves its coordination mechanisms can reduce the effort spent correcting recurring misunderstandings.
These contributions can influence performance without immediately translating into the usual individual indicators.
It would be unwise to assume that they systematically produce a measurable return or that they can be quantified in a uniform way.
Their importance also lies in their capacity to change the conditions in which future results will be produced.
Contribution then becomes a meeting point between the development of people and the evolution of the collective.
It represents the moment when an individual capability takes part in widening the organization’s possibilities.
This perspective does not ask individuals to define themselves solely by their usefulness to the organization.
It recognizes rather that human development can find expression in a contribution that is free, conscious and suited to each person’s responsibilities.
Lasting contribution also assumes that the organization respects human limits.
A person who constantly gives beyond their resources can produce significant results in the short term while compromising their own capacity to keep contributing.
Contribution must therefore be considered over time.
Its sustainability matters as much as its immediate intensity.
The ecosystem can also sustain its own limits
Speaking of a human ecosystem could suggest that interdependence is necessarily a strength.
Reality is more nuanced.
The same mechanisms that allow capabilities to develop can also help maintain ineffective practices.
A team can learn to avoid disagreements.
An organization can become very effective at reproducing decisions that are no longer suited to its environment.
Managers can develop habits of control that gradually reinforce their teams’ dependence.
These behaviors can be consistent with the system’s expectations and experiences, even when they limit its capacity to evolve.
This reality echoes the reflections of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön on organizational learning.
Their work distinguishes, among other things, between adjustments that correct an error within existing rules and those that lead to questioning certain rules or assumptions themselves.
This distinction remains particularly relevant.
An organization can continually improve its processes without examining the beliefs that guide its decisions.
It can become faster at executing a practice whose relevance has not been reassessed.
It can invest in developing its managers while keeping structures that reproduce the behaviors it is trying to change.
Learning is therefore not always synonymous with evolution.
Some forms of learning reinforce what already exists.
Others make it possible to question it.
A human ecosystem capable of evolving must preserve the possibility of doing both.
It must allow people to develop their mastery of the necessary practices while keeping the capacity to recognize when these practices need to be transformed.
This requirement assumes a form of collective discernment.
Not all habits should be abandoned. Not all resistance signals a problem. Not all innovation represents an improvement.
The capacity to evolve also depends on the ability to distinguish what deserves to be preserved, adjusted or called into question.
It is in this tension that a real organizational capability develops.
Developing the ecosystem rather than multiplying interventions
When human capabilities are seen as interdependent elements, our way of thinking about organizational development changes.
We continue to take an interest in individual competencies.
We also examine the relationships that allow them to be mobilized, the structures that guide behavior and the mechanisms that transform learning into collective practices.
This reading can lead us to ask different questions.
When a team lacks autonomy, do people have the necessary capabilities? Are responsibilities clear enough? Do managers themselves have the latitude needed to delegate? Are mistakes treated as opportunities for learning or as proof of incompetence?
When an organization wants to improve its collaboration, do people know how to communicate effectively? Do the objectives encourage cooperation? Does expertise circulate between teams? Do decision-making mechanisms actually allow people to work together?
When a transformation is being considered, have the necessary competencies been identified? Do people have the time and resources to develop them? Do existing practices allow new ways of doing things to be integrated? Is the learning from previous changes accessible?
These questions widen the diagnosis.
They avoid reducing collective phenomena to exclusively individual explanations.
They also make it possible to recognize that an organization can have several strengths while running into limits in how they are brought into relation.
Organizational development then becomes a work of coherence.
It consists in bringing intentions, capabilities, responsibilities and the conditions for action closer together.
This coherence does not assume a perfectly aligned organization.
Tensions, disagreements and constraints will remain present.
It requires rather that these realities can be recognized and dealt with constructively enough to support learning and contribution.
An organization does not need to eliminate all complexity in order to develop its capacity to evolve.
It must learn to better understand the interactions that shape this complexity.
A capacity to evolve that is built over time
The ecosystem of human capabilities never reaches a final state.
People evolve. Teams are reconfigured. Knowledge is renewed. Priorities change. Organizations encounter new constraints.
A capability that effectively met yesterday’s demands can become insufficient tomorrow.
A practice that was once relevant can gradually limit adaptation.
Individual expertise can lose part of its value when it no longer circulates or when it is not renewed.
An organization’s capacity to evolve therefore also depends on its ability to maintain conditions favorable to continuous learning.
This ability requires particular attention to the way changes are introduced and integrated.
An organization can have a relevant strategic vision and the resources needed for its transformation, while underestimating the human effort required to change daily practices.
People must understand new expectations, develop certain capabilities, adjust their habits and sometimes rebuild professional or relational reference points.
These processes cannot be entirely decreed.
They require opportunities for learning, practice and adjustment.
When several transformations overlap, the same human and organizational resources can be called upon at the same time.
The capacity to evolve then becomes a matter of strategic discernment.
It is no longer enough to determine which changes would be desirable.
The conditions needed for their integration must also be considered.
This reflection leads us to an essential distinction.
The capacity to launch transformations and the capacity to integrate them durably are not necessarily equivalent.
An organization can excel at designing projects while struggling to transform the behaviors and practices that will allow these projects to produce their effects.
It can multiply initiatives without proportionally developing the collective capabilities needed to sustain them.
Developing the human ecosystem then becomes a strategic responsibility.
It no longer concerns only preparing people for a specific change.
It concerns the organization’s capacity to keep learning and contributing through the transformations it goes through.
Conclusion — What we develop together
Human capabilities originate and develop through individual paths.
They show themselves, however, in environments where relationships, structures and practices influence their expression.
An organization can have a considerable wealth of knowledge, talent and experience without managing to fully transform it into collective capability.
This transformation requires more than the presence of competent people.
It assumes that their capabilities can meet, complement one another, circulate and contribute to shared objectives.
It also requires recognizing that organizational conditions can support this movement or stand in its way.
Human development and organizational development are therefore not two entirely separate undertakings.
They meet in the interactions that allow individual learning to become collective possibilities.
This perspective changes the way we can understand sustainable performance.
It invites us to consider what people accomplish today, while paying attention to the capabilities they develop to keep contributing tomorrow.
It also reminds us that an organization can improve its immediate results without necessarily strengthening its capacity to evolve.
The distinction deserves examination.
For sustainable performance depends in part on what the organization learns to become while it pursues its objectives.
The ecosystem of human capabilities takes on its full meaning in this continuity.
It connects what people know, what they can mobilize, what they build together and what they make possible for the future.
It ultimately leads us to a question that goes beyond developing competencies.
Do our organizations create the conditions needed for each person’s capabilities to become a real collective capacity to evolve?
The answer probably does not lie in a single intervention.
It is built in the coherence of our decisions, the quality of our relationships, the circulation of our learning and the way we allow people to contribute.
That is where human potential takes on an organizational reach.
And where developing capabilities becomes a condition of sustainable performance.
Scientific references
Deci, E. L., Olafsen, A. H., & Ryan, R. M. (2017). Self-Determination Theory in Work Organizations: The State of a Science. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 19–43.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Argote, L., & Miron-Spektor, E. (2011). Organizational Learning: From Experience to Knowledge. Organization Science, 22(5), 1123–1137.
Argote, L. (2024). Knowledge Transfer Within Organizations: Mechanisms, Motivation, and Consideration. Annual Review of Psychology, 75, 405–431.
Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1978). Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. Addison-Wesley.
A C+ reading — Human capabilities as an evolving ecosystem
The C+™ methodology proposes a systemic reading of human development through six interdependent dimensions:
Awareness · Understanding · Choice · Capability · Connection · Contribution
- Awareness allows us to recognize what is happening within ourselves, in our relationships and in our environment.
- Understanding enriches the reading we make of the situations and dynamics we take part in.
- Choice engages our discernment and our responsibility in the direction we wish to take.
- Capability develops through learning, experience and the mobilization of our resources.
- Connection links our capabilities to those of others and to the systems in which we evolve.
- Contribution represents putting them into action in the service of a value that can go beyond the individual.
These dimensions do not form a mandatory sequence.
They interact in a continuous movement.
A relationship can change our understanding. A new contribution can reveal a capability. A choice can transform our environment and open other possibilities for learning.
The C+™ perspective rests on this interdependence.
It invites us to examine simultaneously the development of people, the quality of their interactions and the organizational conditions that influence their contribution.
The research presented in this essay sheds light on several mechanisms compatible with this reading. It does not, however, constitute a scientific validation of the C+™ methodology as a whole.
This distinction preserves rigor between knowledge that comes from research and the interpretive framework developed by Le Facteur C+.
Next dossier — The paradox of transformation: when organizations accelerate change beyond their collective capacity to integrate it.