Knowledge isn't capability. Are we confusing the two?
As AI changes how we access knowledge, perhaps it’s time to reconsider how we recognise talent, develop leaders and create opportunities.
BY ROB OTERO / FORO
When I took on executive responsibility for HR at Charlotte Tilbury, I hadn’t spent my career working in HR. But I hadn’t arrived without relevant experience either.
I’d spent years understanding how businesses work. How decisions affect the P&L, how people respond to change, how messages are communicated and understood, and importantly, how teams depend on one another to create value.
I had also been the customer of many wonderful HR teams, not least the one I inherited.
Those capabilities had developed through a career spanning leadership roles in finance, strategy, technology and digital, alongside work in mergers, acquisitions, enterprise transformation, building teams from scratch and countless hours spent learning from and supporting others.
Moving between disciplines hadn’t simply tested those capabilities. It had helped me develop them.
At Charlotte Tilbury, I joined a team of people with deep HR expertise. My role wasn’t to replicate that knowledge. It was to bring capabilities and perspectives that complemented it.
Knowledge and capability are different things. In my experience, we don’t always distinguish between them as deliberately as we should.
What do I actually mean by capability?
Knowledge is what you know. The technical, functional and contextual understanding you’ve acquired or learnt. A lawyer understands legal precedent; an accountant understands accounting principles and financial regulations; in HR, specialists bring deep knowledge of areas such as workers’ rights, talent development and recruitment.
Capability is what you can do with what you know. Your ability to interpret context, recognise nuance, solve problems, communicate, exercise judgement, understand consequences, bring people together and deliver outcomes.
Experience is what you’ve learned through doing. The places which you’ve developed knowledge, applied it and refined your judgement. Relevant experience doesn’t always mean having done exactly the same job before.
Knowledge, capability and experience are interconnected, I don’t think they are interchangeable. Value is created when they come together. In my experience (and thankfully for my career) they don’t all have to reside in the same person. The expertise of a team, the capabilities of its leaders and the experience accumulated across an organisation need to combine to achieve outcomes that are greater than the sum of the parts.
VALUE
CREATION
Contributions can come from different people and teams. AI can add a knowledge node, with its outputs verified by people who can assess their accuracy and context, potentially helping people combine these contributions more effectively.
Two people might have access to the same information about a business. One sees a straightforward cost-reduction opportunity. The other sees the impact for customer experience, employee behaviour, supplier relationships and longer-term performance.
The difference isn’t what they know, it’s how they interpret and apply it. Why then do we often use experience as a proxy for both knowledge and capability?
Someone has spent fifteen years in a function, so we assume they possess the capabilities required to lead it. Often that’s reasonable. But it isn’t always right. Certainly not as a linear hypothesis.
Equally, someone who has never held a particular job may already possess many of the capabilities needed to succeed in it, especially if they can work alongside people who do have the specialist knowledge.
The question is whether we’re sufficiently good at organising around this
The value of seeing the whole business
Working in finance teaches you to understand commercial consequences. Operations exposes you to how processes connect and where decisions create friction or impact down the chain. Technology reveals how systems enable or constrain outcomes. Transformation requires you to understand people, incentives and organisational behaviour, as well as how to lead across reporting lines.
Over time, you begin to see the business less as a collection of functions and more as a connected enterprise, or a series of nodes.
You understand that a decision made in one department rarely stays there. That the output of one team becomes the input of another. That supplier relationships can be affected by decisions made elsewhere in the business.
Breadth of experience provides more perspectives. Capability is knowing how and when to use them.
I think this is key when we think about developing business leaders and teams. We want leaders who understand, or can interpret, the whole business, who can connect functions, anticipate consequences and make decisions beyond their own expertise.
In my experience, many organisations still develop leaders through relatively narrow functional pathways, sometimes distinguishing between those who lead the customer-facing business and those who lead the functions supporting it.
Disney famously uses the language of onstage and offstage. But customers don’t experience an organisation as a collection of functions. They experience the combined impact of decisions made across it. What happens offstage is every bit as important to the experience delivered onstage.
Developing leaders means helping people understand both, and how they connect.
I’m not suggesting specialisation doesn’t matter. Businesses need deep expertise, and there are excellent leaders who have developed their judgement largely within one discipline plus a great deal of broader commercial curiosity.
But if we want more people capable of leading across a business, perhaps we should be more deliberate about giving them opportunities to experience different parts of one.
AI changes the opportunity
For much of my working life, acquiring knowledge has required significant time and effort (albeit Google did make this somewhat easier). That has made cross-functional career moves difficult. How do you access the knowledge someone else has built over ten years in a function? The gap can appear too large for an individual or for a hiring decision.
AI may change some of that. It can help people navigate unfamiliar subjects, understand technical concepts, explore different approaches and accelerate learning.
It doesn’t completely replace deep expertise, nor should it. Access to information does not automatically create understanding or sound judgement especially as human context is uniquely, well, human. AI outputs need verification against reliable sources and the context in which they will be used.
But it can reduce some of the barriers that have historically made moving between disciplines difficult and this is where I choose to see a future full of possibility.
If knowledge becomes easier to acquire, it supports my view that we can place greater emphasis on transferring the capabilities people already possess.
I’ve frequently led people who knew considerably more about their disciplines than I did. My contribution was to combine their knowledge with capabilities and perspectives I’d developed elsewhere, to challenge their thinking and extend my own.
There’s a parallel here with AI we should consider how it could make accumulated knowledge more accessible to people who can bring different capabilities to bear on it. This is a more positive sentiment than purely looking at the impact on “knowledge work”.
In a sense, allowing more people to stand on the shoulders of giants….I wonder if Newton had considered the giants may be a series of processors!
The opportunity isn’t to make expertise less valuable. It’s to make it more widely useful.
What might this mean for organisations?
Greater internal mobility could allow people to move between functions more readily, creating development opportunities while helping businesses retain and redeploy talent.
Broader recruitment could open established disciplines to people with different professional backgrounds, expanding talent pools and introducing fresh perspectives and diversity of thought.
AI-supported onboarding could help people acquire unfamiliar knowledge more quickly, reducing the time needed to contribute effectively.
Deliberate cross-functional experience could help organisations develop more rounded enterprise leaders: people who understand individual functions and how the business operates as a whole.
Internal mobility
Broader recruitment
AI-supported onboarding
Cross-functional experience
I recognise none of these ideas are entirely new. Businesses have used rotational programmes, cross-functional assignments and unconventional appointments for decades. But perhaps AI makes it possible to extend these opportunities beyond the relatively small number of people who traditionally benefit from them.
Much of the conversation about AI focuses on the jobs it might change or displace. Alongside that, we should be asking how it could help more people access these opportunities.
There’s a potential commercial advantage here too. Organisations compete intensely for candidates whose experience closely matches established job descriptions. Meanwhile, they may overlook capable people already inside their businesses, or exclude external candidates whose experience doesn’t follow the conventional pattern. Looking more broadly could also help diversify the internal candidate pools.
I will stick my neck out and say the next competitive advantage in talent could come from recognising capabilities that others overlook and giving those people access to the right knowledge nodes.
There’s a development opportunity here. Working across a business gives people the exposure, practice and responsibility through which they learn to connect perspectives and exercise judgement across functions.
I’ve been fortunate throughout my career that people recognised capabilities in me that weren’t always obvious from my previous roles, and gave me opportunities to demonstrate them.
Those opportunities didn’t just allow me to apply what I’d already learned. They helped me develop capabilities I might never otherwise have acquired. (they have also made me quite opinionated on the subject!)
AI will make knowledge more accessible but it could also make unfamiliar career moves easier and allow organisations to combine expertise in new ways. AI won’t remove the need for leaders willing to recognise potential, create opportunities and support people as they grow.
The most important question hasn’t really changed much ever.
It isn’t simply what people know today, but what they might be capable of tomorrow, given access to the right knowledge, experiences and opportunities. It’s just that there may never have been a better time to achieve it.