Competency models are living documents and need curation

A few years ago I had the great good fortune to visit the personal garden of Anja and Piet Oudolf before it closed. The garden was two trains, a bus ride and a long walk from where we were staying in Amsterdam out into the countryside. Oudolf is one of the world’s great garden designers, you may know him his work on the plantings in the High Line in New York City. I got to listen to him talk about his approach to gardening.

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How does your garden grow

For Piet Oudolf, gardening is about letting things grow while giving them shape and support. His gardens are full of emergent textures and patterns that change over time, with the seasons, and as the garden matures. He chooses plants that complement each other and then lets other plants introduce themselves. The results are wonderful. A collage of living change. This is what we aspire to for competency models.

Curating the LinkedIn Design Thinking Group

Two of the Ibbaka team, Jessie Tai and myself, manage the Design Thinking Group on LinkedIn. This is a large group, almost 140,000 members, some of whom are very active (and opinionated). We think of our curation of this group as a kind of gardening. Several times a day we go in and pull out weeds (unwanted posts), fertilize (make comments and encourage conversations) and plant seeds (introduce topics that we think will lead to conversations). We also work to forge connections between people in the group, making introductions or mentioning people by name in comments. Design thinking itself depends on the cross pollination of people and ideas. Communities need to evolve to stay healthy, like gardens.

Competency Models and Community

We think of skill and competency models as a way to engage community. An engaged workforce is critical to performance. Clarity and transparency around the skills needed for different roles helps people take control over their own career and build autonomy. Visibility into the target skills that people want to develop plus insights into skill gaps help the learning and development function target their investments. Investments into skills and skill development drive engagement, especially in a time of uncertainty, where people know they will need new skills to move into new roles.

At Ibbaka we are going beyond this. Our own skill and competency model is being developed as a team. We are working together using our Competency Modeling Module to develop our own competency model. Rather than do this top down, we are coaching experts on different roles to craft the role description themself and to do this directly. That way they can leverage the intelligence built into the software and we get a more consistent model than if the expert had worked in a spreadsheet (which is the most common alternative).

Collaborating on competency models is also a bit like gardening. Skills are the seeds. They are planted through conversations. I can plant a whole seed bed through a competency model, by defining the skills for a role and having people who have that role claim all of the skills associated with it.

Or the seeds can spread more naturally, by having individuals claim new skills and then suggest skills to one another. This ground level skill growth is critical to a living, relevant competency model. Competency models need to be ground up as well as top down.

Not all these seed skills should make it into the competency model. Your competency mode will need pruning as well. Pruning and planting are the main ways to shape a garden. Sometimes you will want to hide skills, or map alternate skill names to one standard name. Other times you will need to delete (prune) whole roles, responsibilities or behaviors. Pruning give shape and shape supports meaning.

A competency model is fertilized through resources and conversations. Resources come in many forms and can be attached at any level of the model. Common resources are people, mentors and coaches, communities (the LinkedIn Design Thinking group is a resource for design thinking) and various learning resources, from courses and online learning to blogs, articles and books.

Conversations are critical to competency models. At some of our customers the primary role of their competency model is to encourage conversations about skills, how to strengthen them and how to apply them. If people are not talking to each other about the skills in the competency model it is probably not fulfilling its full potential.

A truly creative garden needs cross pollination. This can take place at any level of a competency model and is one of the design drivers for our work in recombinant competency models. One may want to take roles, responsibilities, behaviors, tasks, skills from two different competency models to create a new model. The powerful creative engine of concept blending works for competency models (see Mark Turner’s work on this).

One can also get cross pollination by bringing together people with different skill sets. We do this through complementary and connecting skills, which we have written about here.

A competency model should not be a rigid structure; it should not be frozen in time. Competency models come to life when they are used to support growth, to find new ways to apply skills and when they are part of conversations. For this to happen, they require curation, or as we like to think about it, gardening.

For more on how to start building a competency model, see our blog post on creating a competency model

Some steps in competency model curation (or how to grow your garden)

Respect the goals and motivations of all the stakeholders
Provide a framework (the garden beds)
Allow in skills and roles that do not fit into the frame (let things grow beyond the garden beds)
Seed in new skills and new skill combinations
Prune by deleting old roles or responsibilities, by combining two things into one and by normalizing terms
Fertilize by providing resources and encouraging conversations
Cross pollinate by combining people and skills in new ways

Ibbaka Posts on Competency Models and Competency Frameworks

Competency models as learning plans