The Capability You Need May Already Be in the Organization

NASA has technical capability distributed across centers, disciplines, programs, civil servants, and contractors. That breadth is an advantage, but it creates a practical problem: someone facing a difficult problem in one part of the agency may have no reason to know that a person somewhere else already has knowledge or experience that could help solve it.

NASA tested that problem directly through an internal crowdsourcing pilot called NASA@Work. Rather than requiring a challenge owner to identify the right expert in advance, employees could post a problem across the agency and allow people with relevant knowledge to recognize that they might be able to contribute. The three-month pilot posted 20 challenges agency-wide, attracted more than 6,000 participants and 183 contributing solvers, and produced viable ideas or solutions for 17 of the 20 challenges. NASA reported that challenges originating at one center drew contributions from people at other centers and that participants valued seeing problems outside their normal work boundaries.

The platform did not create those capabilities. It changed the organization’s ability to make a problem visible beyond the networks and structures through which the problem owner would normally search. That distinction matters because organizations can possess more human capability than their own representation of the workforce allows them to see.

Organizations Often Know Assignments Better Than Capabilities

Organizations have to assign people to roles. They need titles, departments, reporting lines, job families, budgets, and defined responsibilities in order to coordinate work. Those structures tell the organization where someone sits and what they are currently expected to do, but they are not a complete description of the person inhabiting the role.

An employee may carry skills developed in an earlier job, knowledge from another industry, experience from a transformation several roles ago, technical capability that is not part of the current position, relationships built in another market, or judgment developed through unusual problems that no job description captures particularly well. Organizations hire whole people into roles, but over time the role can become the primary organizational memory of what that person is capable of contributing.

That creates a particular form of blindness: the capability exists, the organization is already employing the person who possesses it, and yet the people who need it may have no reason to know it is there. Research on expertise recognition illustrates the problem. A study of 208 people across 17 organizational groups found meaningful differences in how accurately members recognized one another’s expertise; greater work remoteness was associated with lower recognition accuracy, while use of digital knowledge repositories reduced some of that disadvantage.

The issue arises before knowledge sharing. Someone cannot ask the right colleague for help if the organization has not made it possible to know that the colleague may have something relevant to contribute.

A Role Is an Assignment, Not a Complete Model of the Person

Current roles are especially powerful signals because they are easy to see. If someone works in product, the organization sees a product employee. If they sit in operations, technology, finance, marketing, or delivery, those categories become the natural shorthand for what the person can do. Careers, however, rarely develop inside boundaries that neat.

Someone currently working in product may have spent years in operations. A strategist may have deep technical experience. A technologist may understand commercialization because of earlier work. An employee managing one function may previously have led transformations, built teams, negotiated partnerships, worked directly with customers, or accumulated domain knowledge in an industry the current organization is now trying to enter. The current role indicates where capability is being applied now; it does not reveal the full capability the organization acquired by employing that person.

This is why a company can decide that it needs to hire a particular kind of talent while already employing people with much of the required capability. The search begins from titles, job families, and familiar networks, so the search space can be narrower than the workforce itself. The problem is not that roles are wrong. It is treating the role as though it fully represents the person.

Local Search Can Make Existing Capability Look Absent

When teams need help, they usually search locally first. Someone asks colleagues, a manager contacts another manager, a familiar specialist is brought into the discussion, and if nobody in that network appears to have what is needed the organization may turn to a consultant, partner, recruiter, or new position. That sequence is reasonable because no organization can investigate every employee whenever a problem appears.

Local search nevertheless has a structural weakness: people can search effectively only for capabilities they know how to find. NASA@Work reversed part of that relationship by making the problem visible first and allowing potential contributors to identify themselves. Instead of asking only, ‘Who do I know who might know how to solve this?’, the organization could also ask, ‘Who recognizes that their experience may be useful here?’

Those searches are not equivalent. The problem owner may not yet know which discipline, analogy, prior experience, or transferable capability will prove relevant. A challenge labeled as technical may contain a commercial issue. A customer problem may benefit from experience developed in another market. A process problem may resemble something solved previously in an entirely different function. The useful capability may not carry the title the organization expected to search for.

Internal Mobility Can Make Latent Capability Observable

Large companies have begun experimenting with internal talent marketplaces that represent people through skills and interests as well as their current positions. Unilever’s Flex platform, for example, was designed to match skills needed for projects with employees regardless of where they sat in the organization. In its 2021 annual report, Unilever said the platform helped reprioritize more than 110,000 hours of work to around 1,350 critical projects.

Schneider Electric’s Open Talent Market uses a related skill-centric approach to connect employees with internal roles, mentoring, and short-term projects. Its 2023 human-resources report said the platform had generated more than 34,000 development opportunities since launch, while about 3,000 employees worked on internal gig projects during 2023.

Those company-reported figures do not establish that internal talent marketplaces are universally effective, and the platforms themselves are only implementations. The more important idea is that organizations can create alternate ways for capability to become visible across formal boundaries. Short-term work also produces evidence. Someone who contributes successfully outside their assigned role has demonstrated a capability the organization may not previously have known how to represent.

Visibility Is Only the First Gate

Discovering that a person may possess a relevant capability does not mean that capability is available or sufficient for the task. An engineer may have exactly the experience a project needs while already being committed to more consequential work. Someone may possess useful prior knowledge without holding the certification or current technical depth required to perform specialist work. Another employee may be able to recognize an important relationship without being qualified to own the method or decision that follows.

Capability possession, capability visibility, and capability deployability are therefore different questions. The organization first has to determine whether the capability exists, then whether it can see where it exists, and finally whether it can responsibly bring that capability into the work given capacity, authority, timing, qualification, and other constraints. Discovering hidden capability should not be confused with discovering free capacity.

Visibility is also not proof of expertise. A skill profile, resume, project history, or AI-generated capability map can suggest that someone may be relevant without establishing the depth the situation requires. A recent integrative review of expertise research emphasizes that expertise develops through domain-specific knowledge, education, practice, feedback, and learning rather than simply through years of experience or a declared skill. Capability discovery should widen the candidate set; it should not eliminate validation.

That boundary becomes especially important if AI is used to map workforce capability. AI could make it easier to infer potentially relevant experience from project records, resumes, prior roles, documents, and demonstrated work. Those inferences may be useful search signals, but they should remain hypotheses to validate rather than silently becoming personnel facts.

Build a Better Model of Organizational Capability

The deeper problem is representational. An organizational chart is a model of authority and structure. A staffing plan is a model of current allocation. A job architecture is a model of roles. None of them is necessarily a good model of total human capability.

A richer representation might draw from prior roles, demonstrated project experience, specialist credentials, industries worked in, problems solved, mentoring relationships, communities of practice, development activity, transferable skills, and capabilities employees themselves want to use or build. Problem-based collaboration can complement that representation by allowing unexpected capability to surface even when nobody knew which label to search for.

The objective should not be to build a surveillance system that tries to quantify every employee continuously. People change, capabilities develop and decay, some expertise is tacit, and employees should retain agency over how their experience is represented and where they want to contribute. The narrower objective is to reduce the organizational blindness created when current assignment is mistaken for total capability.

Organizations will still need outside hiring, consultants, partners, acquisitions, and new capability development. Sometimes the needed capability genuinely does not exist internally, sometimes internal capability cannot be redeployed, and sometimes an outside perspective is valuable precisely because it is outside. The argument is simply that before declaring a capability absent, the organization should have a reasonable basis for knowing what it already possesses.

NASA’s internal crowdsourcing work showed that useful contributions could emerge from parts of the agency a challenge owner might not otherwise have searched. Research on expertise recognition shows that awareness of colleagues’ knowledge is incomplete and shaped by communication relationships and distance. Internal talent marketplaces show one way companies are attempting to make capability visible across formal boundaries. Together they point to a straightforward organizational question: do we know where our people are assigned, or do we also know what they can actually do?

Before buying expertise from outside, creating another specialist role, or concluding that an important capability is missing, it may be worth asking whether the organization has ever created a reliable way for that capability to become visible in the first place.

Selected sources and further reading

• NASA Technical Reports Server - NASA@Work internal crowdsourcing pilot and agency-wide challenge results. Source

• Su, Communication Research (2012) - expertise recognition, communication networks, digital knowledge repositories, and work remoteness. Source

• Unilever Annual Report and Accounts 2021 - Flex internal talent marketplace and project-matching activity. Source

• Schneider Electric 2023 Human Resources Report - Open Talent Market, internal gigs, mentoring, and development opportunities. Source

• Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior - integrative review of experts and expertise in organizations. Source