Astrology in Talent Assessment and Succession Planning

Most talent assessment and management methodologies extant today will, in the unlikely event they are remembered at all, be thought of in the same way we now think about luminiferous ether, alchemy or phlogiston--seemingly plausible things that wasted man-years of mental effort for lack of any relation to objective reality.

The current crop of talent management and assessment methodologies: Nine-Box grids; Enneagram; yearly performance reviews based on whatever the immediate manager happens to remember; "Agile" leadership; 6B and 70-20-10 et. al can aptly be termed "astrology for MBAs" insomuch as they are unscientific generalizations stated broadly enough to be accidentally accurate enough to yield some measure of comfort or some illusion of order to those seeking it. After careful evaluation, we propose that that replacing "astrology for MBAs" with literal astrology for talent management will lead to better outcomes for companies; as every weakness of astrology is shared by those frameworks, yet astology has several advantages that they cannot replicate. We shall first turn our attention to the weaknesses and how astology ameliorates them.

Addressing Claims of Being "Unscientific"

Neither astrology nor any other talent management assessment tool is grounded in anything that would pass for science--neither are repeatable, testable or formed on the basis of a theory of physical reality. However, astrology, while being just as accurate, has the advantage of already being familiar to a wide cohort of employees. Preference in hiring for experience in the tools and frameworks the company is already using is ubiquitous for good reason--it makes new hires comfortable and saves the company time and money in onboarding. It is fair to point out that tools like Nine-Box and so on are intellectual piffle and therefore require nothing beyond vague intuitions to apply and thus require minimal overhead, even learning the concepts requires an increased overhead over the widely known astrological model.

Addressing The Bad Reputation of Astrology in Certain Quarters

Astology has a bad reputation in some quarters, especially among self-annointed "rationalists", which can lead to initial shock and derision. However polls show that astrology has a positive reputation up to 2x higher among women. Since women are graduating college at higher rates and also demand less money in aggregate, they are clearly the more important labor pool now and and will only be more important in the future.

The Advantage Of Objectivity

Most management methodologies call for a manager to apply some framework to their reports. They not only have to then learn and understand the framework, but also competently apply it. Research shows this is beyond the capacity of most managers, who, even if they can understand what the framework is asking for, generally have no capacity for objectively correct talent evaluation, and are likely to consciously or unconsciously introduce bias into the process, which is both inefficient and, in the extreme, legally actionable. Astrological assignments by contrast are completely objective and therefore more fair, predictable, and stable than other approaches.

It is also there manager-independent. Many methodologies that try to evaluate 'potential' and 'performance' ignore that potential and performance are context-dependent in that employees are more or less motivated to work for different managers. Therefore every change of report should really come with a reevaluation of the employee in the new context. This introduces overhead that is avoided since astological signs are fixed.

Conclusion

Astrology should be considered by forward thinking organizations for the purpose of talent management and succession planning as it offers familiarity, objectivity, and appeal to the most important hiring cohort while maintaining an equal amount of scientific rigor as any other current methodology in wide use.