I was on a call recently with a client who was feeling frustrated after a series of hiring decisions that hadn’t worked out. He was trying to figure out how to screen more effectively going forward so that he could avoid repeating the same mistakes.
We started, as most people do, by listing the traits of what he believed made a great hire. Words like “dependable”, “trustworthy”, and “hardworking” came up quickly. They were all valid, but I challenged him on whether those traits were actually useful in making better hiring decisions.
The reality is those are the exact qualities we would use to describe almost anyone we enjoy working with.
They are important, but they are not differentiating.
So I pushed him to go further.
I asked him to think about the best people he had ever hired into this role and to describe what they actually did that set them apart. Not how they were described in performance reviews, but how they showed up in real moments:
What did they do on a random Tuesday when things got messy?
When did he first notice that they were operating at a different level?
As we stayed with the exercise, something more specific began to emerge.
His top performers didn’t just execute tasks well. They had an ability to see what was coming next.
- They anticipated client needs before they were clearly articulated.
- They addressed issues before they became problems.
- They connected information across conversations and stakeholders without needing to be told to do so.
That is where the idea of anticipatory intelligence started to take shape.
Anticipatory intelligence is the ability to understand a situation deeply enough that you can predict what is likely to happen next and take meaningful action ahead of direction. It goes beyond being proactive in a general sense. It is about being directionally right before the direction is given.
This capability is not accidental.
It is built on a combination of:
- pattern recognition – where someone can draw from past experiences to interpret what is unfolding
- context awareness – where they understand how their work fits into a broader system.
It also requires a strong sense of ownership, where the individual feels responsible for outcomes rather than just tasks, and the confidence to act without waiting for explicit permission when it matters.
Once we named this, the conversation changed.
We were no longer talking about hiring someone who was simply dependable. We were talking about hiring someone who could think ahead in the specific environment they were operating in.
That level of clarity is what most hiring processes are missing.
The issue is not that organizations are hiring the wrong traits. It is that they are hiring traits that are too general to be useful. High performance is rarely about generic strengths. It is about very specific capabilities that show up in context and under pressure.
If you want to improve your hiring outcomes, you need to start asking a different question.
Instead of: “is someone is a good person or even a strong performer in a general sense?”
The better question is: “what does great actually look like in my environment when things are moving quickly and not everything is spelled out?”
That is where anticipatory intelligence becomes visible, and that is where your best people consistently separate themselves from everyone else.