Pathward

Keith Carnes

Talent Development Modernizer

Keith Carnes is an HR and organizational development leader with extensive experience in talent development, workforce planning and leadership coaching. He helps organizations strengthen employee performance, build leadership pipelines and navigate change by designing enterprise-wide people strategies that foster long-term growth and organizational success.

Recognizing Judgment as the Scarce Advantage

For years, organizations have invested heavily in technical skills, certifications and process efficiency while assuming judgment would develop on its own. AI is exposing the flaw in that assumption.

After three decades in HR and organizational development, I’ve noticed a pattern in the promotion debates and final-round interviews that have proven most successful over time: the person who gets the nod usually isn’t the one with the deepest technical expertise or the most polished answers. It’s the person who asks the better questions – the ones that make the room pause, think harder and reconsider its assumptions.

That observation feels more urgent now that AI can produce a competent-sounding answer to almost anything in seconds. Analysis used to be expensive. You needed someone who'd read the report, run the numbers or sit through the meeting. Now a chatbot will hand you a summary, a forecast or a first draft before your coffee gets cold. What's actually scarce is the person who can look at that output and tell whether it's right, whether it's missing something or whether it's confidently wrong.

That's critical thinking, and most talent strategies still treat it as something people either have or don't, rather than a skill an organization can build intentionally.

Assessing How Candidates Decide

My talent management team is partway through rebuilding our approach around skills-based hiring, cataloging the technical and functional competencies we need for each role, one role at a time. That work is good, and it's still unfinished.

“My talent management team is partway through rebuilding our approach around skills-based hiring, cataloging the technical and functional competencies we need for each role, one role at a time.”

Even at this stage, critical thinking rarely shows up as a named, assessed competency, even though it's the thing that determines whether someone uses a new tool well or just produces fast nonsense with it. We test what people know. We rarely test how they decide what to believe. Rather than asking candidates what they know, ask them to identify the risks, assumptions and missing information in a realistic business scenario. The goal isn't them necessarily finding the “right” answer but rather understanding how they arrive at one.

Building Critical Thinking into Talent Systems

Development has the same blind spot. We assume critical thinking got taught somewhere else, in school or in a prior job, so the training budget goes toward technical certifications and compliance modules instead. I recently ran my teams through an exercise where they were asked to attack their own programs from the perspective of an outside competitor: find the vulnerabilities first, and then map out how to defend against them. The teams came out of it saying it was one of the better uses of their time all year.

I'd love to take credit for that as some kind of facilitation genius, but that's not what made it work. What made it work was forcing my folks out of business-as-usual thinking and into attack mode, looking at their own programs as a target instead of a finished product. That's an unfamiliar position for most people, and it's uncomfortable. It's also the only way I've seen critical thinking actually develop, instead of just getting nodded at in a workshop.

Rewarding Judgment over Agreement

Succession planning is where the consequences of overlooking critical thinking and judgment become most significant. Across the organizations I've been part of over the last thirty-plus years, I've repeatedly seen the temptation to fast-track the person who moves quickly and agrees with the plan, not the one who slows the room down by asking whether the plan is the right one. Speed and agreeableness are easy to reward in a performance review. Good judgment under ambiguity is harder to measure, so it gets undervalued, right up until the moment a leader needs it and doesn't have it.

None of this requires a new HR program with a name and a logo. It requires changing what we actually evaluate. Build a scenario question into the interview process that asks a candidate to poke holes in a flawed plan, and pay attention to whether they will. Make space in development programs for structured disagreement instead of passive content consumption. When you're deciding who's ready for the next level, ask what that person has said no to, not just what they've delivered.

I'll admit I don't have this fully solved yet. We're still working out how to assess judgment in a hiring process built for speed, and how to justify investing development hours in something that doesn't show up neatly on a skills matrix. But I'd rather work that problem now than find out in three years that we built an organization full of people who are excellent at prompting and average at thinking.

That, to me, is the real workforce planning question for the next decade. Not which jobs AI will touch, but whether the humans left holding the judgment calls have actually practiced making them.