The Competency Trap
As some of you may know, I am in the final quarter of my MBA program at The Merage School of Business. The Merage School has a mandate to expose students to strategic innovation - concepts, best practices, pitfalls, execution - a pretty wide view. One of their cutting edge courses is the EDGE course that focuses on how to mobilize action in today's flat, connected world.
The course has plenty of high level support. John Seely Brown, former head of Xerox's research park and current board member of companies like Amazon.com, is a big supporter who is involved in setting the class syllabus and attends most classes. JSB started off the class setting the tone of the type of world we are living in. A world where there is no status quo; a world in constant change. The problem is that conventional business school teaches how to establish processes. Processes require stability to function at a high level and exposes them to the competency trap.
The competency trap is a play on the experience curve which is depicted in the blue line on the graph below. The experience curve is a traditional S-curve that shows how people generally learn. We start gaining competency slowly. Then, we hit a period of quick learning where we become very adept at the task. After that any additional expertise comes slowly. The counter-challenge to competency is adaptability. When we are unfamiliar with our task, we are more open to new ideas of how to do the task. Once we become adept at the task, it becomes quasi-automatic (that is why we are so efficient). In this automated nature, we are not open to new ideas or able to recognize paradigm shifts. The graph below demonstrates that adaptability decreases the more competent we become at a task. The point is that competency is great in a stable world, but what happens in a world of constant change?
Therefore, in this new world, business executives must be prepared operate in a different manner to succeed. While the efficiency gained by competency is attractive, it must never be at the expense of not being able to identify and adapt to change.
How does your organization avoid the competency trap? My guess is that many large corporations have incredible difficulty in this area.
