Why Your Organisation Needs Someone “Unemployable”
At some point in your career, you might realise you are less interested in fitting into roles and more interested in reshaping the system that produces those roles in the first place. At that point, “unemployable” can feel like a useful shorthand, not because you cannot get a job, but because you no longer particularly want one.
This is roughly where I find myself right now. Listening to David C. Baker and Blair Enns talk about why entrepreneurs are “unemployable” helped me connect a few threads about why this kind of work fits the way my brain works. Yours might be the same, or it might be that you just need to bring some of that thinking into your organisation.
The rest of this post explores what that can look like.
The paradox of process
Baker and Enns use the term “entrepreneur” while I'm going to use the phrase “consultant” or “adviser.” In fact, the latter term is what Baker himself recommends in his excellent book Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisers.
In the podcast episode, they describe how consultants are often great at inventing processes for others, but much less enthusiastic about following them themselves. That is, they can see where workflow is broken, where customers or colleagues are getting stuck, and devise new ways of working that reduce friction for everyone else. But when the process solidifies into a rulebook, the very people who designed it start to chafe.
Marcus dePaula
I experienced this early in my consultancy career with one of my first long-term clients. After leaving Mozilla, I ended up working in London a couple of days every week for a large organisation. Once they expected me to follow their procedures like the rest of their employees, and started treating me as part of the furniture, I knew it was time to move on. It was clear they no longer needed an external perspective so much as another pair of hands.
This is not simply being “awkward” or “stubborn”. Creative people often struggle with authority and rigid processes, in part because they can see different or better ways of doing things. Research shows that environments that support autonomy are far more effective at stimulating creativity than controlling ones. So, if your value lies in spotting patterns others have missed, it becomes difficult to treat any given process as somehow mandatory or sacred.
As a consultant or adviser, that “unemployable” streak is an asset to clients. You don't actually want your external collaborator to be fully socialised into how we do things here. Instead, you want someone who is willing to ask why? a lot. Why does this process exist? What problem did it originally solve? And, perhaps most crucially of all, what problem it might now be causing.
Systems, not machines
As Gareth Morgan showed, there are many ways that people within organisations conceptualise them. Part of the trouble is that many still default to thinking of their organisation as a machine.
You can see this in language about inputs, outputs, and “resources” – as well as org charts that suggest work flows neatly from box to box. Both practitioners and researchers have known for years that businesses behave more like complex systems, with feedback loops, delays, and unintended consequences.
Tima Bansal
Change one part of a system and responses are often triggered elsewhere that cancel out your efforts (or create new problems). A classic, straightforward example is a business increasing sales targets which in turn creates more support tickets, thus overloading a team that had no say in the original decision.
Consultants tend to experience this repeatedly with different clients. Over time, that shifts the questions you ask: What patterns keep repeating? Where are the feedback loops? Where are the constraints?
This is where systems thinking comes in. My work often focuses on helping organisations shift from “What is wrong with this process?” to “What is this system currently doing, and why?” That might involve mapping flows of information, analysing decision‑making, surfacing assumptions, or tracing how explicit and implicit incentives shape behaviour.
Processes are not commandments, but hypotheses that can be tested and revised.
Credentialing the uncredentialable
There is another element to this “unemployable” label that interests me. Although my CV lists a number of traditional credentials, CVs have never been very good at capturing the kind of capability I am describing here. They list job titles, institutions, and qualifications, but they rarely show how someone learns from failure, works with ambiguity, or spots and acts on systemic patterns.
This is why I've been so interested in Open Badges and Verifiable Credentials over the last 15 years. They are web‑native digital artefacts with rich metadata about who issued them, what criteria were used, and what evidence underpins the claim. They were born at Mozilla, and since then have been used by universities, community groups, professional bodies, and companies to recognise everything from participation in communities of practice to professional competencies.
I have used digital credentials such as these with many different organisations over the years. I like to talk about using them to encourage particular types of behaviours. One of my favourite examples is the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) who, for the last decade, have defined a plethora of badges. They credential both academic and practical skills that professionals need in the real world.
A useful feature here is that digital credentials can be issued by any kind of organisation for many different kinds of achievement or contribution. They can document what people actually did in messy projects: mapping stakeholder networks, redesigning services, convening cross‑team groups, or challenging unhelpful metrics. Research on digital entrepreneurship and competence suggests that these kinds of applied, contextual skills are closely connected to outcomes like innovation and self‑efficacy.
In my consulting work, I am trying to help organisations think and act more systemically, which also means thinking about the place of recognition. In practice, that might mean:
- Co‑designing digital credentials with clients that describe what their staff actually learned and contributed during a piece of work.
- Using badges as prompts for reflection, rather than simply as icons on a profile.
- Helping organisations build recognition ecosystems that highlight informal learning and systemic contributions, not just compliance with existing role descriptions.
In other words, the same critique I have of mechanistic thinking around processes also applies to mechanistic recognition. We can do better than be defined by CVs that list job titles and traditional credentials.
Final word
My hunch, and my experience so far, is that the same traits that make certain people “unemployable” in the conventional sense make them unusually well suited to this sort of work. People like me resist calcified processes not out of awkwardness, but because they can see the gap between how the system is supposed to behave and how it actually behaves. They are drawn to experiments in shifting patterns, rather than small tweaks and optimisations that leave the deeper structure untouched.
If you are working in an organisation where process tweaks no longer seem to help, or where your best people are the ones quietly questioning how things fit together, that is exactly the kind of situation I am interested in exploring with you.