The world is changing faster than the ways we understand people.

More than four decades of research by psychologist Michael Kirton found that people have characteristic, relatively stable ways of approaching problems and change.

We saw something powerful in our own work, too.

Across thousands of people. Different countries. Different problems. Radically different circumstances.

The problem changes. Your way of solving it is remarkably consistent.

Research foundation: Michael J. Kirton, Adaptation-Innovation Theory, developed through 40+ years of research on cognitive/problem-solving style.

We spent years learning to see what others miss.

Through direct work with more than 5,000 people, we kept seeing the same thing:

Every person had their own way of approaching problems.

• Different situation.
• Different environment.
• Different stage of life.

And yet something distinctly theirs kept showing up.

Their pattern.

• Not a predetermined category.
• Not a label.
• Something individual to them.

We figured out a way to see it.

Years of direct work became the $40 Billion Question™, the proprietary methodology behind SOL.

It allows SOL to surface something conventional signals rarely capture:

Your pattern was already there. SOL makes it visible.

Human capability doesn’t start with a résumé.

• You don’t need a certain job title to have it.
• You don’t need a degree.
• You don’t need 30 years of professional experience.

People solve problems their entire lives.

• At work.
• At school.
• At home.
• In their families.
• In their communities.

Through what they build, lead, create, navigate, fix, survive, and figure out.

Someone with little formal work experience has a pattern.

So does someone with 30 years of it.

Human capability doesn’t begin when someone gives you a job title.

And that matters more now than ever.

The world of work is changing faster than the paths we built to navigate it.

• Jobs are changing.
• Industries are changing.
• Entire kinds of work are emerging while others disappear.

Yet many of the ways we understand people still begin with what they have already done.

That works best when the future looks like the past.

But increasingly, it doesn’t.

Your next opportunity may look nothing like your last one.

• A different role.
• A different industry.
• Consulting.
• A business.
• A movement.
• A mission.
• A problem worth solving.
• Something you don’t yet know exists.

When we can see more of what someone brings, we can see more possibilities for where it could matter.

The job changes. The human capability persists.

It changes the question.

We have become very good at asking:

What have you done?

• Where did you work?
• What was your title?
• What did you study?
• What skills can you list?

Those questions still have value.

But in a changing world, we need another one too:

What could you do next?

That’s a much bigger question.

Because human potential is bigger than a job search.

• It matters when someone loses a job.
• When a founder is building something new.
• When a student is figuring out where they belong.
• When someone is trying to create economic opportunity.
• When an organization is looking for talent.
• When a community needs people who can solve difficult problems.

Human potential matters anywhere someone is trying to figure out what’s possible next.

We learned this by doing the work.

Before SOL, we did this one person at a time.

• Years of direct conversations.
• Thousands of people.
• Different countries, backgrounds, sectors, and circumstances.

That work became the foundation for SOL.

Years of doing this one person at a time. Now we can make it available to many more.

Seeing it is only the beginning.

Once someone can see what they bring, they can put it to work.

See it. Use it. Build from it.

And what happens when we can see this across thousands of people?

Individual human capability is only the beginning.

As SOL grows, we see the possibility of understanding human capability not only person by person, but across communities, workforces, regions, and populations.

What am I capable of?

could eventually help us answer:

What are we capable of?

And that opens a much bigger possibility for how people and opportunity find one another.

The $40 Billion Question™ is going to TEDx.

Later this year, Dr. Esther Zeledon will bring the idea behind the $40 Billion Question™ to the TEDx stage.

The talk will explore what we miss when we define people by the paths they’ve already taken, what becomes possible when we see more of what people bring, and why that matters in a world where those paths are changing.