The dictionary defines competence as the ability to do something well. In business-speak, Bloomberg defines competence as “Sufficient ability or fitness for one’s needs. The necessary abilities to be qualified to achieve a certain goal or complete a project.”

These definitions describe being able to do something. None of them address having the motivation to actually do something. Business progress is measured in accomplishment, not potential. Being able doesn’t mean anything is going to get done.

Struggling to find a term to describe learning that leads to action, I turned to one of my favorite resources on words, the Online Etymology Dictionary. There I discovered that competent descends from Latin competens, which meant to strive together. Interestingly, working together remains the primary means of developing competence.

Competens is a participle of competere, which means compete. Competere once meant “to come together, agree, to be qualified,” later, “strive together,” from com- “together” + petere “to strive, seek”. Somewhere at least 400 years back in time, compete took on its current meaning of “strive to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others.” Rivalry replaced cooperation.

Synonyms for compete: contend, vie with, vie for, enter into competition, take part, strive, struggle, cope with, be in the running, become a competitor, enter the rolls, enter the lists, run for, participate in, contend for a prize, race, race with, engage in a contest, oppose, wrestle, be rivals, contest, fight, tussle, joust, battle, seek the same prize, bandy with, spar, fence, collide, tilt, bid, face, clash, encounter, match wits with, match strength with, play, grapple, jockey, rival, emulate, keep up with the Joneses, take on, take on all comers, go in for, lock horns with, go out for, throw one’s hat into the ring, give a run for one’s money.

Individuals (plural)

I explored this individual vs. group meme in a column entitled Trios Trump Singletons in the August issue of CLO.

While the individual is the old unit of human production, continued emphasis on the individual instead of the group chokes off today’s opportunities with yesterday’s limitations.

Groups of people, not individuals, are the key to producing value in the knowledge era; yet, corporations hire individuals, performance reviews assess a single person and career paths are solo.

Whenever we catch ourselves thinking of individual workers, let’s take a moment to consider whether we should be thinking of teams instead, as conversation is the wellspring of innovation, and innovation results from the creative friction of people with differing perspectives.

They co-create the concepts that bring them into harmony with their environment. They reinforce one another. That’s “they,” not “he” and not “she.”

Ah ha! My real interest is in organizational competence, and that’s the product of internal competition in the old sense of the word. It’s what happens when people strive together. It’s called collaboration.

My columns for CLO are limited to 750 words. (Form over function?) The August piece ended with a learning example.

In the past, organizations often sent a single individual to an outside meeting, believing that he or she would bring the message home to share. This rarely happens because the individual is the wrong unit of production for taking advantage of learning innovation.

Organizations that send teams are more likely to put things into practice. Colleagues reinforce one another; an individual is but a lone voice. A small team cannot only plant the seeds of innovation but also nurture them, so the optimal unit for an innovation-building session is a trio, not a single person.

I plan to devote more energy in 2009 to exploring social learning. I’m going to substitute organization for one in Bloomberg’s definition of competence. “Sufficient ability or fitness for the organization’s needs. The necessary abilities to be qualified to achieve a certain goal….” If the workers aren’t motivated, the organization is not qualified to achieve its goals.

A concise video interview with me on Informal Learning at Online Educa Berlin. This was the first of three interviews that afternoon so I’m a bit fresher here than on the others.

An unworkshop is composed of small pieces, loosely joined. I always reserve the right to hop around based on my reading of the participants. (Every unworkshop is unique unto itself.) Sometimes I get so worked up that I feel that I am channeling the material rather than presenting it. Unlike traditional workshops, nothing in one of these sessions is for sure. That’s the “un” part. And it’s there because uncertainty engages the mind.

Earlier this month, at Online Educa in Berlin, I conducted my final unworkshop of 2008. Here was the schedule:

And here’s a more detailed agenda from the Berlin session. The supporting presentation slides are all available on SlideShare. Asked if I weren’t afraid of being ripped off, since I do charge for these events, I replied “Not in the slightest.” It’s not the jokes so much as how you tell them. My goal is to rattle people’s cages, to make things memorable, and to invite bold change. Copycats don’t have the energy.

Solo presentations are deadly dull, so I’ve taken to inviting friends to take a role in my unworkshops. Nigel Paine came to my mid-year session in Melbourne to share some stories from BBC, and Ross Dawson visited the unworkshop in Sydney to describe his compelling Web 2.0 overview. In Berlin, we continued this theme with half a dozen “mountain guides” who chimed in with examples and wisdom, and made themselves available for networking throughout the event. Here’s one guide’s take on the Berlin unworkshop.

I love doing these events. It lets my inner performer loose. However, what with the advance planning, travel, prep, and follow-up, a one-day event can consume a week. I think I’ll shoot for a dozen unworkshops in 2009. Given the economy, I expect some of these will be working sessions where we identify how to slash costs while boosting performance.

To get over the here-today-gone-tomorrow phenomenon, I often precede an unworkshop with preparatory readings or a video. (Here’s an example from 2007.) Afterward, I’ll leave a structure for follow-up or an artifact of the session, such as this video.

How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist, by: Ellen McGirt

Fast Company describes how Cisco is implementing an “unprecedented forward-looking strategy to unleash what it’s calling a ‘human network effect’ both on and off the Cisco campus.” It’s the model I’ve been preaching, although unlike Cisco, it hasn’t enabled me to bank $26 billion in cash.

John Chambers has seen the light: command-and-control is slow and inefficient compared to free-flowing networks. Collaboration trumps cowboy individualism.

Chambers: “Fifteen minutes and one week to get a business plan that used to take six months!”

Mike Mitchell: “We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know…. Everybody is an author now.”

A Facebook-style directory at Cisco serves not just as a way to make lunch plans or find a second baseman for a softball game. It is a real-world, real-time sorting apparatus, designed to help anyone inside the company easily find the answer to a question, a product demo, or a preecisely the right warm body to speak to a waiting customer or present at a conference — in any language, anywhere around the globe.

To my way of thinking, this is the convergence of knowledge work and informal learning that I’ve been trying to promote.

Can Cisco-style collaboration really work outside of Cisco? Its supporters inside the company argue that the global marketplace and the ubiquity of Web 2.0 tools demand a workforce empowered to generate ideas, solve problems, and contribute to the great good without micromanagement. “It’s the number one item on the list of most CEOs–to break down the barriers, between me and my customers, and me and my partners.”

Well, yes. In fact, I think companies that don’t figure this out won’t be with us that much longer.

Guidance from John Chambers:

• Focus on what we can influence, and not over- or under-react to things we cannot. It’s a question of living in the world as it is, not the way we want it to be.
• Make a determination of how long this will last and how deep it is going to be. ‘Prepare yourself for it to be longer and deeper than you think. And then build flexibility to adjust quickly if you need to.”
• Get ready for the upturn. “What’s our vision for where this industry is going with or without us?” That, he says is a five-year horizon. “What is our differentiated strategy within that vision?” That’s a two- to four-year plan. “How are we going to execute in the next 12 to 18 months?”

My friend Robin Good made a must-see presentation on Love for Education at LeWeb in Paris. Robin’s vision and mine are so close that I could safely say “what he said” with no further elaboration. I feel the same way when I hear George Siemens or Teemu Arina. I was taken by surprise to find that four of us took part in Robin’s presentation in Paris. (I’d forgotten that Robin had asked me to reply to some questions on video a while back.)

We would inhabit a better world if we did not confuse learning with teaching. Schools are for socialization, not education. The underlying assumption is that life is a big secret. You can achieve success if you know the secrets, but the magicians who run the schools are the only ones who can let you in on them. It’s time to wake up from this shared illusion.

If you were on a spaceship, with three months to teach your children what they would need in their new life, what would you teach them?

how to live healthy
hot to read to understand
how to learn
how to be creative
how to empathize
how to tell truth from fiction
how to predict consequences
how to value yourself
how to live a meaningful life
how to communicate effectively
how to to ask good questions
how to have great fun

Non-linear problems call for non-linear analysis. Courtesy of David Price, here is a DebateGraph of our session on the future of learning last month.

Related post: Canary Wharf Meeting on the future of learning

Back of a bus in Aachen

In a prior post, Reflections from Aachen, I asked “What do you think? Should I begin using competenz as shorthand for gaining the ability to get things done?” Several people chimed in with helpful comments and this morning I received an email from a Norwegian colleague from the Aachen sessions that helped broaden my perspective.

A Norwegian project on Competence Reform focuses on what’s needed for the workplace and for society as a whole.

Charlemagne, “the first European”

My work hasn’t really looked at corporate learning from this perspective. I have concentrated on what a business can do to improve the performance of its people, with almost no regard for the needs of society. This is in part a reflection of the differences in the role of government in the U.S. and in Europe, particularly Scandanavia. On this side of the Atlantic, this is an oxymoron: “Hi, I’m from the government and I am here to help you.”

Participants from all the Nordic countries participated in a Think Tank on Future Competencies in 2006 to investigate:

What will Nordic working life and society look like in the future? What competencies will adult individuals need to develop in order to function? Through what systems and organisations can this competence be developed? How can Nordic culture be the basis for an effective policy?

They concluded that:

In the competence society it will not be enough to “know about” something; “the ability to perform” is a decisive factor in personal success. Personal competence and being capable of performing a job in a way that generates added value are factors which make the individual an attractive job candidate. This requires, firstly, an understanding of the need to constantly learn new things and, secondly, the prerequisites for doing this.

We need to deepen our understanding of the concept of competence and to discern more clearly between developing competence and increasing knowledge. The think tank has based its work on the definition that competence means the capability and resolve to perform a task by using certain knowledge and abilities. If this is to be the basis for the competence concept, competence development has to take place in a number of fields and include capability, resolve, knowledge and abilities.

As the individual and individual development is increasingly becoming the focal point of other competencies, the think tank has arrived at the following categories of competence:

Professional competence is the competence needed for performing a task in a work situation in a way that creates added value in relation to the work that is being carried out.

Social competence comprises the ability to communicate and interact with people in different contexts through, for instance, language, artistic expression, movement, mathematics, or technical tools.
Personal competence, whose core consists of self-knowledge, forms the basis for the development of social competence.

The aim of categorising competencies is to make it easier to differentiate and discern between various types of competencies and thus show how the three categories interact and support each other. Understanding competence, how it is acquired, and what competence categories form the essential basis for a better future, helps to improve the planning of adult education.

The subtitle to the unbook is “Getting Things Done in Organizations.” I think I’ll keep it.

One of the The Buzzwords of 2008 in The New York Times.

A style of hands-on self-education that benefits the student without concern for curriculums or the interests of schools, corporations or governments. In other words, an autodidactic approach that spurns commercialism, mass-market approaches and top-down goal-setting. Coined by Jim Groom, an “instructional technologist” at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va.

Of course, I agree with the sentiment. This is the revolution in progress that will transform our culture’s notion of learning. I do have two concerns with Groom’s definition:

• Autodidact suggests that the student is learning in isolation. Learning is social. We need be clear that the learner is in charge but the primary resource for learning is other people.
• Maybe it’s just me, but the punk label conjures up images of rebels sporting studded collars and Doc Martens hob-nail boots. I expect self-directed learning to become the norm in corporations and governments. We need a term that includes the folks in suits and blue collars. Maybe informal learning or natural learning will do.

It was cold in Berkeley yesterday. Probably not your kind of cold, but I awoke to find frost on the car and that is rare here. Note the lemon crop beyond the car.

Last night the board of the eLearning Forum convened in Orinda to savor the past and ponder the future.

The CEOs of eLearning Forum, past and present.

John Seely Brown describes what schools should be like: architectural studios. Work in the open, take feedback from others.