How Does Busan Recognize Good People?

Selection and Discovery

There are two ways to choose people.

One is selection. Education, career, certifications, portfolio, awards history. You set criteria, pass those who meet them, and drop those who don't. It's fast, appears fair, and is easy to explain. Whether it's youth support programs, startup packages, or talent recruitment, almost all selection processes in Busan choose people this way.

The other is discovery. Is this person in it for the long haul? Do they like Busan? Are they someone who won't run away when things get difficult? These are things not on the rubric, not convertible to numbers. That's why it's much harder and slower than selection, and difficult to explain.

The premise of this article is simple. The insight to recognize good people is not created through measurement. It grows through repeated encounters.

Numbers Don't Tell You About People

In previous articles, we've seen what Busan doesn't measure. Measurement is only a tool for tracking whether trust is growing; it doesn't create trust itself. The same goes for choosing people.

We live in an era where measurement is becoming increasingly sophisticated. A person's education, history, output, and reputation can now be analyzed and scored by machines in seconds. The work of filtering people through measured values is already leaving human hands. Tools that filter faster and more accurately get cheaper every year.

That's why no one can get ahead through selection alone. When everyone applies the same criteria with the same tools, they simply filter for the same people. The only difference that remains is the insight to recognize what's not on the rubric. Only when measurement is complete does the work that only humans can do begin.

This is why Busan misses builders. Busan's selection process is skilled at filtering but clumsy at discovery. People who pass the rubric pass everywhere. The people Busan really needs to recognize are those invisible to the rubric but who deeply love Busan.

Filtered People and Discovered People Are Different

The limitations of choosing people through a single evaluation are evident even in numbers.

In Korea, the one-year survival rate for startups is 64.8%, the three-year survival rate is 44.5%, and the five-year survival rate is 32.1%. Two out of every three that start disappear within five years. At the moment of selection, everyone would have seemed promising. Their documents were excellent, their presentations smooth, they passed the rubric. But the ability to pass a rubric and the ability to endure for five years turned out to be different things.

Selection only looks at the moment of selection. How that person works a year later, how they endure failure three years later, whether they're still there five years later—these cannot be known through a single evaluation. What Busan really needs to recognize is not people who are good now, but people who will last, and selection cannot distinguish between the two.

Even the world's most selective accelerators decide acceptance through documents and brief interviews. It's fast and efficient, but doing so selects people who are good at using the rubric. They may be different from what a city actually needs: people who will stay long.

Discovery Is Only Possible Through Repetition

The English word for recognizing good people is scout—meaning to find hidden gems and follow them for a long time. In French it's reconnaître: to know again (re + connaître), meaning you only know after seeing repeatedly, not once. The Japanese 見出す means to pull out and discover what's buried. All three languages point to the same place. Recognizing people is not work of elimination but of finding, and it's only possible through repetition, not once.

Then how do you cultivate that insight? There's only one way: repeated encounters. You cannot know a person from seeing them once. Only after seeing them again each quarter, checking where the work they started last year has reached this year, and observing whether a single promise was kept, does this person finally become visible. Insight cannot be written in a manual. It accumulates only within the time one person has watched another for long. That time cannot be shortened. No matter how fast measurement tools become, whether someone will endure for five years only becomes visible after spending close to five years.

For Busan to become a city that recognizes good people, it needs not more selection but places where repeated encounters are built. Structures that see the same people again over several years rather than programs that support for one year and end; structures where the gaze of someone who has watched a person for long continues, rather than evaluations where judges change every time; structures where trust accumulates over time rather than granting qualifications through a single selection. This isn't saying we need more middle managers to look after people. It's saying that time to observe the same people for long must be embedded in the system.

This goes in the opposite direction of efficiency. It's slow, labor-intensive, and hard to prove with numbers. But it's the only differentiator a city can have in an age when measurement is complete. Discovering good people is the first place Busan has yet to build. Building that place is not a more sophisticated evaluation form, but a promise to observe a person for a long time.

And after discovery, how do you foster growth? That's the next question.