Corporate Talent Detection and Development

2 Methodology and Working Principles

2.1. Gap-distance: shifting thought and observation

2.1.1. Transdiscipline-cross-culture: the fruitful side

Our research, interwoven with and through experience, has led us to create a cultural gap to reshape our own evidences. Effectively, while we began work on the question of the operating modes favorable to the actualization of potentials in 2003, it seemed necessary to us, if we wanted to produce a thought resource – that is, a useful material not diluted by centuries of inferences – to go and observe elsewhere how other cultures operate and “think” apart, and not differently from us.

The word gap implies distance and objectification of thought. In fact, the gap “shows” at least two places of observation (which refer to reality). Difference, on the other hand – as a concept – subjectifies things, people and places through the use of distinction (it is necessary to know in order to distinguish). There is a difference between the Americans and the French as much as there is a difference between the Germans and the English, but there is a gap between the Chinese and the Europeans, because the common ground of understanding is not “the same”:

“This thought about the gap takes us out of both easy universalism and lazy relativism: one projecting its vision of the world on the rest of the world, as if it were self-evident, and the other closing each culture in its own bubble and isolating it” [JUL 12, p. 44].

The word talent has been trapped ...