IOWL Calibre Briefing - editorial working copy
The skills gap has a gap: why human capital policy may be overlooking Calibre
Governments are right to invest in skills. But producing more capability is not the same as converting that capability into dependable performance. A Belfast-based leadership institute argues that the missing question is not only what people can do, but what governs how they use it.
For years, the productivity debate has returned to a familiar list: investment, technology, infrastructure, management and skills. None of those are optional. A productive economy needs people who know more, can do more and can adapt as work changes. Yet the persistence of the productivity problem raises a less comfortable question. What if building capability is only part of the task?
The Institute of One World Leadership, or IOWL, calls this the Capacity Conundrum: the recurring tendency to increase human and institutional capacity without giving equivalent attention to the quality of judgement governing how that capacity is exercised. The proposition is deliberately narrower than a claim that values explain productivity. It asks whether something important is lost when policy counts qualifications and skills but treats judgement, integrity, candour, responsibility and consequence-awareness as background characteristics rather than developmental variables.
The distinction matters because organisations do not experience human capital as a stock of qualifications. They experience it through decisions. A highly skilled employee can still conceal information, avoid challenge, optimise for the wrong target or damage the performance of colleagues. Another employee may use comparable technical capability with better judgement, collaboration and awareness of consequence. Both are skilled. Their effect on the organisation can be very different.
IOWL separates three dimensions. Capability describes what a person knows and can understand. Competency describes whether that capability can be applied effectively. Calibre describes how, why and for whose benefit capability and competency are exercised. The institute's claim is not that these dimensions can be cleanly separated in every real-world decision, but that the third is often insufficiently visible in education, recruitment and productivity policy.
That framing is significant because the UK Government's own work has attempted to quantify the contribution of skills to productivity growth rather than treating skills as the whole explanation. IOWL does not infer that whatever remains unexplained must be Calibre. Instead it asks what happens inside the conversion process between acquired capacity and realised performance. Management quality, incentives, culture, information flow, trust and judgement all sit somewhere in that conversion.
There is also an unusually relevant OECD signpost. In its 2018 paper Investing in Integrity for Productivity, the OECD argues that skills and other productivity policies can lose effectiveness when governance and integrity are weak, because the surrounding framework influences the decisions made by people about how resources are allocated. The paper also reports evidence linking corruption with lower multifactor productivity. IOWL does not read this as proof that Calibre is an economic multiplier. It reads it as evidence that the conversion of human and institutional capacity into performance is conditioned by more than the stock of skills itself.
The institute uses a simple metaphor. Education, skills, knowledge, experience and health are the bricks of human capital. Calibre is the moral mortar that helps those bricks operate as a coherent structure. The metaphor is conceptual, not econometric, but it points towards a practical research question: can organisations with similar stocks of capability differ systematically in performance because of the way human judgement is exercised?
If the answer is even partly yes, the implications reach beyond leadership training. Recruitment would need to ask not only whether candidates are capable and competent but how responsibility is likely to be exercised. Professional development would need to do more than add technical skill. Universities could continue doing what they do best in knowledge and capability while adding a distinct developmental layer concerned with values-governed judgement. Productivity policy would become not only a question of supplying skills but of improving the conditions under which skills are converted into value.
IOWL has spent more than a decade constructing an architecture around that proposition. Thinking began in 2013 and the institute was formed in 2016. Its Positive Value Leadership framework defines 24 Positive Values across six Exemplars, develops them through structured learning and reflection, and links assessed professional pathways to Calibre Credits. Registered Aspirants now come from 188 countries, giving the institute an unusually international base from which to continue testing its ideas.
The critical word is testing. IOWL does not claim that the Capacity Conundrum is a proven economic law, nor that Calibre explains the portion of productivity not attributed to skills. Its stronger contribution may be to make a neglected question researchable. We have become sophisticated at measuring how much capability a workforce possesses. We may be less sophisticated at examining what governs the way that capability is used.
The productivity story, then, may not be that skills policy has failed. It may be that the skills debate has a gap of its own.