CARVE YOUR CAREER - Building Capabilities for Accountability Beyond Job Titles

Sometimes, what the fast pace of change calls for is slowing down and revisiting first principles

As I personally embrace the evolving nature of the world and work, ponder on the changing role of education, and try to make the most of what governments around the world are doing to respond to the situation, I can’t but wonder if we are simply innovating around the edges when we should be embracing true creativity, rejecting current paradigms, redirecting or reconstructing from enduring first principles and reimagining the possibilities. I wrote a post about innovation and creativity a while back exploring this idea of innovation and creativity.?

While understandably the risks to large systems might be prohibitive, smaller systems like teams, start-ups, and small and medium enterprises could embrace the opportunities presented by their size, to test and establish scalable versions of new ways of doing things. However, what seems to be happening is that the accountable persons in these smaller systems seem to want to emulate the practices of the large systems, the same practices the large systems know aren’t working but find it too risky to make fundamental changes.

So, just like the large systems, the smaller systems also end up taking new creative ideas and tacking them on to old systems hoping they’ll be just new enough to drive the change needed to solve the problems and deliver the desired value in the new world context.?

Borrowing from known parables,?

We seem to be putting new wine in old wineskins or sewing a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. We are then wondering why the skin is bursting or the patched tear seems to be getting worse.?

We as practitioners, more often than not, miss the point, and fail to fully leverage the affordances of the new because we view and try to make sense of the new through the lens or perspective of the old. To use terms by the psychologist Piaget, we assimilate (force-fit the new into the comfort of our existing frames or paradigms) rather than accommodate (allow the new to challenge and eventually change our existing frames and paradigms thus seeing and stepping into the vast possibilities opened up by the new).

One thing that has changed a lot and should impact how individuals think about work and careers is how we approach developing our knowledge and skills. How we build our capabilities. Technology, and specifically the internet, has democratized education and expertise.

As I said in earlier posts,

Answers surround us if only we know what questions to ask.

Well, the questions come from our experiences and the problems we are trying to solve. The questions come from our intentionality, purposefulness, and accountability for desired results. Our capability, in the pragmatic sense, is becoming less about the educational qualifications we possess and more about the real-life or real-work problems we can solve.

What this means to me in simple terms is that as individuals, we need to go back to basics and embrace the age-old "exchange of value" idea; someone needs problems solved and looks for someone whom they believe they can trust with the accountability to solve those problems and offers the person something they value in exchange for the solution to their problem (value exchange with mutual respect).

So, the questions I always ask myself are, am I the person to help you solve that problem??and What do I want in return?

CARVE Your Career - Going Beyond Job Titles, Discovering the Value of 'You' in the Role

While using CARVE to make sense of this evolving world of work, I came up with the idea of a career optimizer where the goal is to optimize the development value of work experiences to inform career choices and success. We need to de-emphasize job titles so as to re-focus our attention on the human essence of the role or job. An essence encapsulated in the value the role can deliver through the types of problems the role is accountable for solving and the incumbent having the capabilities (knowledge, skill, and will) required to solve those problems.

In order to de-emphasize job titles, we need to find a way to shift the focus to capabilities. Capabilities, not from a training perspective, but as a way to describe the experience of work that also describes what it takes to achieve success.

The simplified capability framework below extends the capability dimension of CARVE to the professional context and is versatile and robust enough to describe any and all jobs at all levels across industries and sectors.?

The framework focuses on you, your competency as the actor, then on what you are doing, your activities, and finally where you are doing it, the domain, professional domain for example. These three are then situated within the larger context of the organization or the country. The importance of context is the complexities context might introduce that impact what it takes to achieve results.

I will now talk a little more about each element - domain, activity, and competency.

Domains of Practice and Expertise - The Problems to Solve and the Solutions to Problems

At the outer ring of the framework is the domain, which represents professional domains of practice and expertise. When we talk about problems or results or solutions, we are invariably talking about professional domains with bodies of knowledge drawn from the experience of practitioners and related academic research that help to make sense of what is going on, what can be achieved, and what can be done to achieve it.

The framework views domains in two ways, the?domain where the problem to be solved exists, which is the?secondary domain,?and the?domain where the specific solution to the problem is coming from, which is?the primary domain.?

Given that accountability is about results and results are defined in the domain, accountability for results in any role or job is defined based on the domain. The primary domain defines accountability for the solutions your role or job is expected to offer, and the secondary domain for the problems you're trying to solve.?

Your level of domain knowledge determines

1. How well you understand the results that can be achieved,
2. The quality of your situational judgment, and
3. The effectiveness of the decisions you make about what actions to take

For more on this, you can read the post on "making decisions and performing actions well enough to achieve your results".

Seeing Organizational Structures as Domains of Practice and Expertise

In an organizational context, we should view the organizational structure of units, functions, departments, or tracks as domains of practice and expertise. Whenever we create one of these functions, departments, or tracks, we are calling out a domain of practice and expertise that we want to explicitly develop.

In the role you are in right now, think about these two questions:?

1. What is your primary domain? – what types of solutions does your domain offer to problems?
2. Whose problems are you trying to solve and what domain are those problems in? – this is your secondary domain.??

Activity - The Different Things We Can Do and Ways We Can Contribute to Solving Problems

The middle ring of the framework is activities. Activity here refers to what the role or job does in solving the problem.?Since activities draw their meaning from the results, it means activities draw their meaning from the domain where the activity is being performed.

The approach to activities here means they are common and operate with the same principles where ever (i.e. domain) they are performed. The content and output/deliverables are determined by the domain but the principles of performing the actions are not.

The framework simplifies activities across all roles and levels into five types based on the nature of the actions performed and outputs produced to solve problems.?

The activities are:?

• Strategizing: Imagining and creating the future from the present
• Creating: Producing solutions to problems
• Engaging: Helping others make decisions on how to solve their problems and meet their needs (often with solutions you offer)
• Supervising?(not management): Optimising efficiency and effectiveness of multiple streams of activities through alignment and coordination
• Executing: Getting things done, and done well.?

Given that responsibility is about outputs/deliverables, responsibility for specific deliverables in any role can be defined based on these five activities. While all roles may perform all activities to varying extents or levels, one or two of the activities will be the focus of the role, taking up most of the role's capacity. In the same way, specific departments or tracks also typically have specific types of activities as their core.?

Think about the role you are in right now, which of these activities do you think is primary for that role? Which of these activities take up most of your time in the role?

Competency - The Capacity to Learn and to Pursue and Achieve Desired Results

Finally, the inner ring is about you, the person and it focuses on competencies - cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal.?Together, these competencies determine your capacity to respond to various situations you encounter and achieve your desired results.

The framework simplifies competencies to these three as they are common across all human experiences, all roles people play across life stages, and have the same impact on success across all these roles.?

In an ideal situation, the competencies will determine how much accountability a person can shoulder as a function of how well the person can manage their capabilities, the responsibilities, and the level of authority required for that level of accountability.?I wrote a post on accountability that goes into more detail.

This relationship between accountability and competency applies to all roles a person plays including professional ones.?Progress across life stages or career levels requires higher levels of competency, for example, a university-student-aged kid requires higher than a primary-school-aged kid, parents require higher, and so on.?The greater the accountability, the greater the competency required.

Competency and Career Levels

In an organizational context, higher career levels and job grades, from junior to senior executives, indicate greater accountability and require higher competency.

If you think about the role you are in now, where will you place your level of accountability? What about your domain expertise and mastery of activities? What about your competency?

A Web Application That Shows How The Framework Applies to All Typical Roles

I have been slowly developing an application that scaffolds this alternative way of engaging with roles. The application presents roles in a generic organization using this capability framework.

The idea of the application is to use the framework to facilitate and scaffold new ways of thinking about your current, past, and future experiences. Help generate fresh insights that expand your view of career possibilities and inform decisions about how to approach current roles and what roles to consider taking up in the future.

The scaffolding guides structured thinking about the capabilities you have developed as a result of your past experiences, what you are developing (or can develop) through your current experience, and what you want to develop through your future experiences. The past informs the present, and the present informs the future. ?

As an individual, you can then use the insights generated from browsing the application in the following ways?

1. Identify and plan your learning to maximize the developmental value and potential of your current experiences.
2. Reflect on all your past roles and experiences and try to recognize and appreciate the capabilities you've developed across domains, activities, and competencies, paying attention to the types of experiences that have resonated with you. Not just experience in general, but the specific aspects of the experiences that made it resonate with you, was it the domain area, the type of primary activity, or the level of accountability?
3. Use these insights to identify future roles based on the capabilities you've developed, and the enhanced view of your interests drawing on the experiences that resonated with you.

As a leader of a function or department, you can use the insights generated from browsing the application to

1. Structure your department and teams
2. Clarify role expectations and purpose

The link to the current version of the application is shared below. Have a look and I would love to know what you think. ?

Link to the Career Optimiser Application

In Summary...

Intentionality is about being clear about your desired results. Purposefulness is about having meaningful desired results. Accountability is about taking ownership of ensuring the meaningful desired results are achieved. Capability is the most critical enabler of living an intentional, purposeful life with accountability.?

Over the next few posts, I want to talk about each of these dimensions in greater detail and how our approach to them can reconnect us and the people working with or for us, with our natural agility and adaptive capabilities even when we are operating in large social systems like working in organizations as employees. ?

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