Read the full transcript of public policy professor Anirudh Krishna’s talk titled “The 7 Pillars of Unlocking Potential” at TEDx Gateway on June 4, 2023.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction: A Transformative Encounter
ANIRUDH KRISHNA: Everything changed for me after I met Chandru about 15 years ago in a village in Andhra Pradesh, India. I was there with the research team. I went for a walk in the village. Suddenly I heard a shout from behind and turned around to see a young boy pushing himself forward with a big wooden stick, his right leg twisted by childhood polio.
Chandru was then about 13 years old, studied in the 8th standard in the village school and his favorite subject he told me was mathematics. Mathematics, I thought. I know some mathematics. I pulled out my notebook and wrote three math questions for him. Very quickly and accurately he answered them. I wrote three more questions and then another three harder still. Each time he answered them deftly and correctly.
And then with an impish grin he flips the notebook around and writes three questions for me. I struggled with the first of his questions. His second question stumped me. Luckily for me his father wandered in at that time and rescued me. I commented on the boy’s mathematical brilliance and asked the father what he hoped the son would become. To my surprise he laughed. “Ha ha ha,” he said. “He wants to be an engineer. Ha ha ha.” “Why do you laugh?” I cried. “No one around here has ever become an engineer,” the father told me. “No one ever will be.”
That shocked me. Over the next few days I went around the ten neighboring villages and asked about the positions people had achieved over the last ten years. It turned out that the father was dead right. Not only had no one never become an engineer, no one had become an architect, an accountant, an airline pilot or anything better. The highest positions were those of school teacher and local official.
My Journey and Research
What was I doing in that village? I started my career in the Indian Administrative Service implementing development programs for the government. I learned a great deal but after fifteen years realized I needed to study more and went to Cornell University and later became a professor. Over the last twenty some years I have done grassroots research in many different countries but with the same basic question: Why are people poor and how can they be given a fair deal?
I found many many people like Chandru around the globe. Individuals who have boundless talent but little to no opportunity to discover it and realize their full potential. Bottom line, talent is everywhere but not opportunity. Thousands, millions of talents routinely go undiscovered and unrewarded.
To make equality of opportunity a reality and to achieve world-class excellence, societies need to invest in talent ladders. What is a talent ladder and how did I come upon the idea?
The Jamaican Success Story
It began with a random conversation in class. How could Jamaica, a small country of three million people, have produced such an impressive flow of world-beating sprinters? How could Usain Bolt, whose parents ran a village grocery store, rise from there to world-class competition? Why did his talents not go unrecognized and unrewarded like those of the thousands of individuals I had met in different countries?
To find out, I went to Jamaica. The first thing I noticed was that not everybody is built like Usain Bolt. There are tall Jamaicans and short ones, thin ones and fat ones, slow ones and fast ones as there are in other places. It’s not about genetics or geography. What is special is the system they have developed which tags a fast Jamaican at a young age and takes her or him up the steps of a talent ladder. An easy to access sequence of steps that begins at the grassroots and goes to the highest levels. Every child can compete. Those who perform better move higher up the ladder.
Global Examples of Talent Ladders
But Jamaica is hardly alone in this regard. Once you look around, you see many other examples. Wrestlers in Haryana, a small state in India, have won more international medals than any other kind of sportsperson. The talent ladder in this case begins with akharas and academies at the grassroots. Those who do well in dangals and competitions move up to higher level academies, to government training centers and to the pro wrestling league, a newish rung in this talent ladder.
Other examples of world-class excellence and talent ladders that I have studied include marathon runners in Kenya, tech entrepreneurs in Estonia, writers in Nigeria, classical musicians from Sistema which began in Venezuela and has spread around the world, women golf players from South Korea, hackers from North Korea. You probably know of other examples.
Here’s the key. They can support different kinds of endeavors. But at root, all talent ladders are built to the same core design principles, the seven principles or seven pillars of talent ladders.
The Seven Pillars of Talent Ladders
First and foremost, open access with transparent and objective standards. Everyone has a realistic opportunity to participate. Barriers to entry are systematically removed. In Sistema, for example, the grassroots music rooms or nucleus are set up in the poorest neighborhoods so that these children also can easily participate. Transparent and objective standards are required in parallel to weed out influence and nepotism. In Jamaica, local athletics meets might be taking place on dirt tracks with many barefoot runners, but the timing equipment will be world-class and that’s the only thing that matters.
Second pillar, unbroken ladder, all the steps in place. South Korea came from nowhere to capture women’s golf by building a hierarchy of golf tours from the amateur to the intermediate to the international levels.