Why Manage Capability?
It is astounding that in a society in which most people define themselves by what they DO, or their work, there exists no comprehensive theory of work, even less a developmentally grounded one. As E. Jaques rightfully suggested (1994), if such a theory were to be formulated, one would have to distinguish what a person HAS - her competencies - from what a person IS - her capability. As Jaques saw it, this difference between what somebody ´has´ and ´is´ is of great relevance for the discipline of process consultation. I share his view. While one can suspend what one has, one can never suspend what one is. One is who one presently is.
As this volume has shown, much of what is considered ´behavior´ in our culture is really a consequence of the developmental resources available to an individual at a particular time point. This also holds true for work behavior, or performance. In the Constructive Developmental Framework presented in this book, I address these resources summarily as Capability, to distinguish them from the various competencies a person might be credited with. Capability refers to what somebody IS, while Competence concerns what somebody HAS. The two are, of course, related, in the sense that the former is the enabler of the latter. Capability grounds competencies. It concerns the use of competencies, and enables a person to use competencies in an optimal way. As the reader now understands, one and the same competency is used differently at different levels of Capability.
The world of work including "human resources" would be a different world if the distinction between Capability and Competency had been understood. However, this is not the case. Neither industry (including adopters of the Scorecard) nor the military have so far grasped the difference between the enablers of competence (=capability) and competence itself. Nor can one say that the coaching community, whose work is largely behavioral, has grasped this distinction. Why is this an important societal issue?
If you remember Enron, you will probably agree that the people in that company were by no means any less competent than people in other big companies. In fact, executives and employees of Enron rightfully prided themselves on their intellectual smartness and social savvy. Considering what happened to them, the most likely hypothesis is that they were not scoundrels as much as thoroughly immature developmentally. This means that they acted from a developmental level at which they did not feel accountable in a way commensurate with their office and political power. Especially in the upper echelons of Enron, executives massively regressed to an S-2 vantage point, at least in decisions affecting corporate culture.
Since social-emotional and cognitive capabilities are so crucial to human achievement, it should astonish nobody that they directly determine what is going on in organizations, including corporate culture. Far beyond exerting their influence on teams, they shape every echelon of a company, and pervasively inform corporate climate.
It is an exciting idea that one might be able to assess the Capability of an entire company and express it in a form that indicates the developmentally rooted business intelligence a company embodies. As we have demonstrated in Appendix C, through aggregation of developmental data we arrive at valuable new insights into human resources at a level beyond the individual. In this last section of the Appendix, I further illuminate this gift of aggregation.
When we think about the Capability of entire companies, the question arises: can social-emotional and cognitive capabilities be managed, and if so, how? To answer this question, some clarifications are in order.
At the present time, both ´competencies´ and ´talent´ are the topic of management. What, then, could it mean to manage Capability, a set of enablers of competence? Such enablers are nothing else but the social-emotional and cognitive resources individuals bring to their work. Therefore, by Capability Management I mean the strategic harnessing of organizational human resources that are based on insight into the social-emotional and cognitive structure of the workforce. It is the purpose of Capability Management, to transcend the merely transactional activities of HR Departments and strengthen the transformational management capacity of organizations in the direction of learning organizations.
These are big words! Many schemes for bringing about learning organizations have been invented. They have all failed since the hidden dimensions of work capability, namely, social-emotional (ED) and cognitive (CD) resources, have been ignored or played down. At the very least, they have never been systematically assessed! As the 7-step model of learning to think developmentally in Chapter 9 implies, it take time to wake up to an understanding of Capability!
The Power of Aggregation
When, as in Appendix C, we reflected upon a particular team as an upwardly divided T-3 team, we took a step toward data aggregation. Leaving behind all individual detail, we characterized a number of individuals as a unit functioning at S-3, such that a minority of them stretched into S-4. We can easily enlarge the scope of aggregation to larger numbers of people.
As larger and larger numbers of people are taken into account, there is no need to assess every one. Rather, we can work with sampling, selecting a sample of the larger group (called a population). In order not to err when interpreting assessment outcomes, we need to begin by defining a representative sample, that is, a small group of people that statistically represents the larger group adequately. Putting together a representative sample of all line managers of a company, or all internal coaches by selecting the typical cases, would be an example of creating a pure sample. Mixed samples that comprise individuals having different functions and degrees of responsibility in a company require special deliberations.
What does aggregation tell us about a specific representative sample that investigating individual members of a population would not? It tells us what the group making up the sample has in common, and whether there are patterns showing deviations from a hypothetical Capability standard. For instance, if a representative sample of all internal coaches of a company were forming an upwardly divided T-3 team, considering that the standard for professional coaching is S-4, we would know that these coaches wouldn´t be highly effective in coaching executives at levels such as S-4(5) and beyond. Although internal coaches don´t typically form, and act as, teams, it might be crucial for the purpose of establishing excellence within an in-house coaching program, to know what the mean developmental level of the company´s coaches is. A representative sample of such individuals will tell us whether the company´s coaching program indeed has the quality the company thinks or professes that it does.
Competence versus Capability
When you think about the distinction between what people ´have´ and ´are,´ it is really no different from the one I have repeatedly made between the Horizontal and the Vertical, or between what is ´behavioral´ and what is ´developmental.´
Competences are behavioral in the sense that they increase incrementally, in time, and thus can perhaps we improved through training. As you now know, Capabilities don´t work that way. They are not based on performance skills but on world views (developmentally grounded personal attitudes), and they develop discontinuously, over stages. That means that if you have Competence X - such as the competence to coach or manage people - you will use that competence as a function of your Capability (e.g., developmental stage). That´s why human capital management is crucially not about competences - they can be assumed - but about their actual USE in real time. And that use can be predicted since it has everything to do with Capability! For this reason, measuring Capability would seem to make a great deal of sense. Only what can be measured can also be managed.
The Balance of Capability and AccountabilityAs E. Jaques was the first to point out in Requisite Organization (1998), the crucial issue for companies, and organizations generally, is the ability to balance people´s capabilities - not their competences - with people´s readiness to be held accountable for what they do. Of course, accountability varies with work complexity. We can therefore say that each company is defined by two essential architectures. As shown below, the first architecture is one of complexity levels of work (complexity architecture), while the second one is composed of different levels of capability (or developmental stages):
On the left side of the table, you see a calibration of levels of work complexity, associated with time horizons varying between 1 day and 50 years (Jaques, 1998). The levels of work complexity are also called STRATA, and indicate different work demands and accountability levels, from janitor to CEO and Board Member. For work on each of these strata, a different time horizon is required. For instance, while a janitor typically does not have to think ahead more than at most a single day, a CEO at stratum VII ideally needs to look ahead 25 years or more to do her job well. Accordingly, different cognitive capabilities are required at different strata.
Excerpt from Otto Laske, Measuring Hidden Dimensions, IDM Press 2006, Obtainable at www.interdevelopmentals.org/book.html
