Frog in a Boiling Pot – Matrix of Acuteness

Let’s get to the point of discussion straight away. Because the background is so clear and thoroughly discussed. The business environment in the 21st century is fast moving, rapidly changing and unpredictable. As pointed out on many occasions, the most suitable and commonly applicable way to survive is to progress in a more speeding way compared to the environment. This is what we call “Agility” of an organization. Therefore, this article is basically looking at creating agile organizations.

 The intention of this article is not to lay out a framework for creating agile organizations. This has been done by many researchers and practitioners throughout the last couple of decades. Purpose of this article is to identify a major obstacle hindering the implementation of any efforts to create agility and progression.

The obstacle is “The unawareness of the managers in an organization that the environment is progressing. Also, it is progressing at a higher speed than they are changing”. In a previous article, I discussed when to “Give up” (Read the article https://www.dhirubhai.net/post/edit/when-give-up-without-being-failure-rajitha-ranaweera). There we learned that the best time to give up without being a failure is when you realized that “even your best efforts won’t allow you to progress at a higher speed than the environment you operate”.

But the problem is many managers do not have a clue on this. So they don’t know the speed which the environmental progress, speed which they progress and whether the current effort is their best effort or not. As a result, many managers/organizations are like Crabs in a bucket of cold water. What they don’t know is that the bucket is on top of a hot stove.

Conceptual Background

People can be categorized in many different classifications. One of the most popular classifications is based on their intelligence. There are thousands of free and paying tests one can use to measure their levels of intelligence.

Yet I would like to go back to an interesting classification done by our ancestors. Interestingly the same classification can be identified across many cultures, civilizations, and religions. You will be able to find this classification among Persian apothegm, Sanskrit, Arabic and Chinese proverbs, teachings of Lord Buddha, Confucius, and other religious leaders.

According to this classification, there are for types of people. They are explained in the figure below.

We all fall into one of these four boxes. How you develop yourself and how to interact with others depend on where you or the other party falls in to, in this categorization. Summary of this is given in the table below.

Organizational Implications

Let’s try to project the above into organizations. In organizations, we are looking for “competencies” and “Know-how”, instead of “Knowledge”. Hence by Simply interchanging “Knowledge” with “Competency / Know-how” you get a simple framework which can be used to classify employees in an organization. Then the model will look like the following;

It is important that the organizations have their key players in the “Top Left Quadrant”. This will enable the organizations to support their plans by effectively using their strengths.

One of the concerns you may have in reading this article is to know, what are the competencies a manager should have. Can there be a set of universal competencies a manager should have? The other concern is how to identify whether a manager has relevant competencies and whether they are aware of the gaps they have?

Next two segments trying to answer these questions one by one.

What Competencies a Manager needs to have

Is there a universal set of competencies a manager needs to have? To answer this, we have to go to the root of the competencies and ask “Why managers need competencies?” They need competencies to perform the key functions of a manager. These key functions are planning, organizing (implementation), leading and controlling. These four functions are common and essential to any manager irrespective of their fields. The intensity of these functions within the job may vary according to the job, yet all managers need to perform all four functions.

They need three types of competencies to perform these functions effectively and efficiently. They are;

• Conceptual Competencies: Ability to understand, analyze the present context and predict the future scenarios
• Technical Competencies: Ability to understand and manipulate the activities of the respective functional areas the manager is responsible for
• Human Competencies: Ability to connect with people, develop relationships and convince them to follow the guidelines given by the manager

These competencies are interconnected and complimenting one another. Also, the competencies are common except the technical competencies. Thus there will be a set of competencies every manager needs to have along with an another set of “technical competencies” which differ from job to job.

How to evaluate whether the Managers are aware/unaware of their competencies and gaps

Checking whether the managers have these competencies is essentially straightforward. But checking whether they are aware of the competencies can be tricky. The following process can be adopted to achieve both those objectives.