Strengths and Weaknesses of Competency Models

[Image: Excerpt from OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual, 1944 Link to PDF seems broken, happy to email]

Leadership profiling tools are "fundamentally flawed" says new research

"According to the research, up to 45 per cent of the statements used in competency models to assess and develop managers fail to identify the most important behaviours and frequently overlook important factors."

It's easy to be cynical. But much more difficult to work out which part of the above to be most skeptical about - the leadership profiling tools themselves or the research (from an HR consultancy) saying they're fundamentally flawed.

My evidence is better than your evidence
Firstly, I'm suspicious of this kind of evidence - the kind that gets included in a press release.

This is the kind of data that will be used to end discussions not start them. Somebody who's job it is to do this kind of meta-job will end a discussion with somebody who's job it is to do a job by saying, "Yes, but where's the evidence base?"

The people producing this evidence are clearly not liars. But the way the information is produced has a lot in common with lying. Dubious precision and, importantly, the ability to convince yourself as much as the audience are the key factors in being able to lie to somebody effectively.

Lex parsimoniae
These reports and press releases aren't lies. But they are misleading.

The principle of Occam's Razor (or the 'Law of Parsimony') is:

"When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better."

The simplest explanation for the weaknesses of the competency models is not that they're 'fundamentally flawed' and you'll therefore 'need to run regular health checks'.

But that they're fundamentally flawed and that you should build this fact into working with them.

Just because it's a cliche doesn't make it less true...
This stuff is hard. The world of work and organisations is complex and changing faster than our ability to stick it into a framework. Putting people into competency frameworks is slightly inhumane and, therefore, will always present problems.

Here's my version of the above statement from the press release:

"From many conversations I've had with leaders and managers, I've learned that virtually all of the statements used in competency models to assess and develop managers have the potential to obscure as much as they reveal and they almost always overlook important factors.

This means that until we train managers themselves to use and contribute to the models - and perhaps including a dynamic element to the models by combining them with environment scanning/sensemaking/effective Knowledge Management techniques - they should come with a health warning. They're useful as a guide, but leaders need to beware of the HR tail wagging the dog."

The Importance of Being Random

You're on the end of a 'horseshoe' seating arrangement with 20 other people. The trainer has just started by asking everybody to say their name and 'a bit about themselves' starting at the other end.

Part of you is in a cold sweat about what you're going to say in the 'bit about yourself'. Star sign? Hobbies? Do you have to be modest and make a joke - or swagger like beef on the hoof?

Part of you knows that it doesn't matter. By the time the attention is on you, everybody will have slightly forced smiles, a case of the fidgets and the desire to be somewhere else.

Welcome to Creeping Death.

Farr-out Links to Learning have a number of techy suggestions about keeping it random. They look fun and it's nice to see a way to use your projection screen to add energy to the room rather than sucking it out.

But just as good is to remember what Creeping Death is, how it feels and what it will do to your training session - whether at introductions OR later on when you're 'doing feedback'.

ANYTHING else is better.

[Image from betsymartian]

Five Whys

Following a recent post on the Five Whys techniques. I thought I'd add some notes, as we've been using the Five Whys technique quite a lot with a good deal of success. The basic idea is that you try to go beyond a proximate cause and identify the ultimate cause by asking - you guessed it - 'why' five times.

Here's how it works:

eg Why was I late? Because I missed the bus. Why did I miss the bus? Because I was couldn't find my keys. Why couldn't I find my keys? And so on, and so on.

Fishbone Diagrams
My first wind of the technique came via the always excellent (though sparsely posting of late) Shmula. The Five Whys technique is often accompanied by the Fishbone or Ishikawa Diagram (the image above comes from shmula.com).

Using the Five Whys as a brainstorming technique
If you look at the 'fishbone', you can see that each bone has prompts (or capstones) designed to help brainstorm possible causes. Obviously, they're designed for a factory. But what if you don't work in a factory?

Five Whys and Change Management
We've been using ADKAR for our capstones. ADKAR is a simple tool to diagnose personal change. The idea behind ADKAR is that to change you need to go through a number of stages. And that these stages are "sequential and cumulative".

Here are the stages:

A=Awareness
D=Desire
K=Knowledge
A=Ability
R=Reinforcement

Imagine somebody who's always short of money at the end of the month and ends up borrowing money from friends and family.

Stage 1 (Awareness)
You're not aware how cheesed off your family are, nobody's told you.
Stage 2 (Desire)
You know they're cheesed off. But it's not very often. And besides - they're loaded.
Stage 3. (Knowledge)
A budget? What's a budget?
Stage 4. (Ability)
Aha! A budget. How do I go about filling one of these in?
Stage 5. (Reinforcement or Routine)
You've got a budget. Now you just need to remember to stick to it...

Clients have suggested that 'Routine' is a better word than Reinforcement. It's simple and puts them in mind of coaching.

Five Whys and Coaching
I can see this technique being useful in a coaching scenario. But you would probably want to avoid continuously asking somebody 'Why?'

Here's Five Alternatives to Why:

Who was it that first noticed that ... was a problem?
What is it about this ... that causes you problems?
When did you first notice that ... was a problem?
Where do you think the problem with ... lies?
How do you imagine that this ... became a problem?

Strictly Literate

Children are cute when they hold books upside down. But even the pushiest of parents wouldn't call this 'literacy'. Young children sometimes fool their parents into thinking they can count due to a combination of wishful thinking and the Clever Hans effect. The same thing rarely happens with literacy.

What about Digital Literacy? Can even older children persuade their parents and teachers that they are literate?

Once, sitting by the side of a lake in Spain, I saw a snake. It rose out of the water, swayed and cause a commotion. Soon, a cry went up, "Especialista, especialista!"

The latinate term, the beard and heavy-rimmed glasses, the khaki shorts and walking boots - accompanied by a weighty tome - gave the 'specialist' an academic air. He looked exactly like the kind of man who would present educational TV shows, earnestly narrating the death of panicked docile beasts at the paws of predators, solemnly describing the brutal mating rituals of creatures humping like pistons.

The crowd parted and hushed respectfully. He approached the snake cautiously. I prepared for edification, my travellers' anecdote already formed.

I have no real memory of what happened next. The confusion, the foreign language, the non sequitur - all I remember was the shock as the specialist slammed the book down on the snake, killing it instantly. The crowd cheered and went back to their picnics. There was blood on the rocks. I thought, "Snakes have red blood?"

The especialista had fooled me (and only me) into thinking he was literate. This is not what books are for.

This is one of the reasons that literacy, as a concept, has worked. Books are only for one thing. The same is not true - at all - for digital media. It seems like Digital Media aren't mature until they've been repurposed or hacked.

None of the popular digital media now are soley (or even mainly) used for the purposes for which they were designed. Some of them weren't even designed with a specific purpose in mind. How are teachers, parents and employers supposed to deal with this? If my children start killing snakes with Digital Media what should their teachers do?

Who decides whether it's okay to hold digital books upside down?

[The title of this post is a reference to Strictly Ballroom. If you haven't seen it, you should.

This post was prompted by Doug Belshaw's (@dajbelshaw) "Watch my Ed.D. thesis grow in real-time…" project - he's putting his 'What does it mean to be Digitally Literate?' thesis online as he writes it. Very webby. Utterly foolhardy.

This post was also prompted by Ira Socol's (@irasocol) comments ("one of those really concise shift statements that makes me bend my own frame a bit") on a post by Dean Shareski (Ideas and Thoughts) - which I picked up on via Weblogg-ed.com in a post on Digital Inclusion

You'll notice that this post is only slightly related to both of these.]