Prof. Sándor Klein, Dr. Sc.Managing director; SHL Hungary Ltd.

The future of the competencies1

SummaryThe competency-movement, started about 25 years ago emphasises that effective and/or superior performance depends not only on abilities, but also on motives, traits, self-concept, etc. The movement is divided into two parties: one which concentrates on the specific knowledge, skills etc. required to perform a specific job, and the other which tries to identify the “generic high-level competencies”.Although these were not new thoughts, they opened up new possibilities. They:

emphasised the importance of finding casual relationships between human characteristics and performance,

showed the importance of valid measurements, provided a language which is understandable to both the social scientists and the line

manager put the question of “who is the best fit person?” into a wider context of “how to

improve the quality of life?”, “how can we find or create meaningful work?”, “what kind of behaviour helps mankind survive?”

SHL is in the forefront of research and practice in the field of competencies: it is quite natural, since SHL’s methodology (the aptitude tests, personality questionnaires etc.) were always directed towards assessing work-related and at the same time basic characteristics. Further theoretical and practical work is needed to find the basic elements of human characteristics, and the functions, which determine competent behaviour in the different roles.

Introduction

Since the time when human beings divided the different jobs necessary to their survival

it was probably apparent that some people are performing better in some tasks while

others in other.

For the theoretically inclined this simple fact poses a lot of difficult, basic questions:

Are we born (genetically determined) with this basic differences or is it a result of

external factors (as early family environment, education, society or others like

nutrition etc.)?

Can we find some basic elements in the human nature along which we differ and from

which we can build up a model of the behaviour of human beings (like thinking,

emotion and motivation)? Etc.

For those who are more practically oriented another set of questions came out of this

observation:

Where is the optimal place for the individual in the world of work?

(What kind of profession should I choose?) and

Who is the best person for this task?

(How can I identify and attract the person who ensures the best results?)

1 Paper prepared for the IIIrd International Seminar, Lisbon organised by SHL Portugal 19th Nov. 1997: Competencies for the future

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We should emphasise though, that the difference between “theoretical” and “practical”

is fairly arbitrary and changing in time and space. Many times one can’t find a good

practical solution without having a proper theory and many theories try to explain

practical problems.

In this paper I’ll try to find a good balance between my theoretical interest and the

practical usefulness.

The definition of the term “competencies”

“Competencies” proved to be one of the most useful concepts in the Human Resource

Management Practice (Fig.1). But although it is wildly used in the field of testing,

selection and training, debate continues over what competencies really are and how

they can or should be measured.

According to “A Simplified Model” (Russ-Eft 1995) “Competencies may be thought of as

the core elements in a periodic table of human behaviour. The “atoms” in such a model

are behavioural indicators. These behavioural indicators can be grouped into

competencies, or ‘elements’. Finally, several competencies can be combined to form

other competencies, or “molecules”. As Spencer and Spencer (1993, p.9) say “A

competency is an underlying characteristic of an individual that is causally related to

criterion-referenced effective and/or superior performance in a job or situation.”2

In a recent brochure (SHL 1997) SHL defines competencies as “sets of related

behaviours, arising from underlying aspects of the individual, which are

determinants of job success.”

The latter two definitions are strikingly similar. Even in the small details:

“underlying characteristics” (or “sets of related behaviours, arising from underlying

aspects of the individual”) is referring to a fairly deep and enduring part of a person’s

personality (motives, traits, self-concept, knowledge, skill),

“causally related” (or “determinants”) is referring to the theory that a competency

causes or determines behaviour, and

“criterion-referenced” (or “job success”) is referring to the theory that competency

actually predicts who does well or poorly at something.

2 The Spencer and Spencer book was spent to me by John Raven after I asked him to send me some literature which would clarify this popular but not easy-to-grasp notion for me. When I wrote back to him that after reading this basic book I still don’t understand what competency is he invited several outstanding researchers of the field to meet in York (England) for a one day conference. I must admit that even after this conference there were quiet a few questions left open at least for me. At the end of the conference the participants decided to put together a book on the main issues of competencies. I am very grateful to John Raven that in order to help me in writing this paper he shared with me some of the manuscripts from this future book.

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From these definitions it is transparent that any good that has been done in developing

reliable and valid methodology in selection, is also a step toward developing

“competency models”.

However there is a basic difference between the traditional and the competency based

approach hidden in the above definitions. If we take seriously that we are not merely

interested to find good predictors of job success but we are looking for “determinants”

and “causes” you can see that the competency based model is more interested in

finding answers to the question “Why?”.

Unfortunately when talking about “Competency-models” much of the competency-

movement is only paying a lip-service to theory: most of the times the so called

“competency model” is simply a set of personality factors “presented by cluster”

(Spencer and Spencer 1993, p.153).

We will be justified to talk about “competency models” only if we will be able to identify

not only the basic elements of the successful behaviour but also their relationship to

each other or putting it another way: the ways successful people achieve their success.

It seems that there are two different use of the term “competency”:

One is referring to specific knowledge and skills required to specific jobs.

Competency defined this way is the interaction between a specific task (or role) and

a person. The difficulty with this definition partly comes from the fact that they both

keep changing. The competent worker is like Graetzky, the great hockey-player, who -

according to his own words- became famous, because he never tries to get where the

pack is, but where it will be.

The other definition of competency says that competency is the ability to carry out

valued activities effectively. Researchers who adopt this definition usually talk

about “generic high-level competencies.” The problem with this is that “they are hard

to identify difficult to nurture, and still harder to assess using conventional

psychometric methods” (Raven 1996).

The beginnings

Although the title of this presentation promises some thoughts on the future of the

competency movement, it is probably justifiable to begin with some short notes about

the past and present: how it started and what it is all about.

It is usually David McClelland, who is credited or blamed for launching the competency

movement in psychology, about 25 years ago, with his paper on “Testing for

Competence Rather Than Intelligence”. As he recently said: “In this paper, I reviewed

studies indicating that traditional academic aptitude and knowledge content tests, as

well as school grades and credentials:

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1. Did not predict job performance or success in life,

2. Were often biased against minorities, women, and persons from lower socio-

economic strata.”

There is nothing really new in this. Perhaps the first personnel psychologist - at least by

inclination if not by action - was Plato. Plato identified an important role for testing in

the ideal state in his dialogue with Socrates, saying: “no two persons are born exactly

alike, but each differs from each in natural endowments, one being suited for one

occupation and another for another.”

Now I don’t think that when speaking about these “natural endowments” Plato was

merely referring to “aptitude” or “knowledge”.

To make a big jump in the history Hugo Münsterberg (1914) before World War I wrote,

that “The one psychological problem which seems most significant ...., is the mutual

adjustment of mental personality and practical work. The individual needs the place

for which his mental dispositions make him fit, and the work demands the individual

whose abilities secure his success.” (P. 415; italics added)

Although he finished this sentence with mentioning only the “abilities”, the expression of

“mental personality” and “mental disposition” indicates a broader view: the

acknowledgement of the relative contributions of ability and motivation to job success.

It was the success of the intelligence testing during the First World War (the Army

Alpha test could be administered to groups as large as 500 in less than 50 minutes), and

of the specific aptitude tests (e.g. for “mechanical aptitude” or “eye-hand co-ordination”)

before and after World War II, which gave the impression, that by using these specific

tasks, psychology can measure something important about future employees.

As Landy and Trumbo (1980, p.55) write: “Industry was ready to accept testing as ‘the

answer’. Unfortunately, no one had taken the time to ask ’the question’.

So McClelland was actually reminding us, that to predict job success takes much more

than testing aptitude and knowledge content. Attitudes, styles, motivations etc. could

play at least or even more important role.

It reminds me to the history of the “creativity movement”, for which Guilford is

“credited or blamed” because of his 1959 paper on “Testing for Creativity rather than

Intelligence.”3

Now it is easy to point out that long before Guilford the Gestalt psychologists between

the two world wars or even back in the ancient times people did realise that to “create

something new it is not enough to be clever”, but it does not change the fact that

Guilford said something important at the right time in the right place with a convincing

3 The real title of the article is: ”Three faces of intellect”

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way, and thus started a movement which gave enough work for thousands of

psychologist around the world for 30 years4.

From aptitude testing to the assessment of character

“Our challenge was - says McClelland about their first ‘competency study’ on selecting

junior Foreign Service Information Officers for the US State Department - to answer the

question: If traditional aptitude measures don’t predict job performance, what does?”

By now every first grade psychology student could suggest some improvement to the

“traditional process” of testing knowledge: by adding for example work related

questionnaires on the interest, motivation and personality structure of the applicants,

putting him/her in a simulated situation in an Assessment Centre, conducting

appropriate structured interview. Of course all of the above procedures would be based

on thorough analysis of the job in question.

McClelland’s greatest contribution to this change was to emphasise that success in life

depends much less on narrowly defined skills, and much more on the kind of person we

are than people may commonly think.

If this is the case the question is than how could we assess and facilitate the process,

what Carl Rogers called “On becoming a person?”

Rogers himself gives some good advice in his book called “Freedom To Learn for the

80’s” (1983, pp.142):

“Those men who surrounded Kennedy and Johnson were all gifted, talented people. As

Halberstam says (in his book on The Best and Brightest): ‘If those years had any central

theme, if there was anything that bound these people, it was the belief that sheer

intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything.’… This complete reliance

on the cognitive and intellectual caused this brilliant group to lead us little by little into

the incredible quagmire of the Vietnam war. The computers omitted from their

calculations the feelings, the emotional commitment of little people in black pyjamas

who had little equipment and no air force, but who were fighting for something they

believed in. This omission proved fatal. The human factor was not put into the

computers because ‘the best and the brightest’ had no place in their computations for

the feeling life, the emotional life of individuals.”

Covey (1990), the well-known American author on management training goes one step

further pointing out that it is not the “personality” but the “character” what counts,

emphasising the importance of the “integrity” of the person.

4 I can’t resist mentioning my own paper (Klein 1983a) on “Testing for Learning Potential rather than Intelligence” (the real title is: “Intelligence and Learning Potential - Theory and practice”). I was one of those researcher who tried to replace “intelligence” with a more dynamic notion of “learning potential”, but although I still maintain that it is easier to define and measure the letter I admit that most of the problems connected with intelligence reappear again with learning potential (e.g. “can we find ‘general learning tasks’ to measure ‘general learning potential’?”).

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So McClelland’s suggestion to go out of the narrowly defined predictors of job success is

a major step in the good direction, but not something which is characteristic only to the

competency movement. But than what is?

From the personality questionnaires to the Behaviour Event Interview

(Methods of Identifying Competencies)

According to McClelland (1997) those psychologists who were interested in identifying

the personality traits associated with executive leadership have usually first selected a

self-report questionnaire which has been carefully worked out in the psychometric

tradition so that it was known to be reliable and to yield pure factor scales and hoped

that such psychometrically sound tools can predict e.g. the managerial success in a

certain organisation.

“The competency approach starts the other way around - writes McClelland. It begins

with the problem and works back to discovering what human characteristics contribute

to solving it.”

Again, I think this is nothing else, but a sound critic of the praxis in the industrial

psychology: although every basic textbook emphasise that nobody should carry out any

selection process without a proper job analysis, in practice people quite often shoot

blindly into the woods and than are surprised that they missed the target.

A “traditional” selection model suggest

a) a careful study of the job in order to create hypothesis about what is necessary to be

successful in the job (realising that there are several roads leading to Rome),

b) identifying how can we assess these characteristics or behavioural tendencies in

different people and

c) verify, that using this assessment tools we can predict success.

This could be just as well a description of how to arrive to a competency model5. The

difference than must lie in the “how” (the methods of identifying the elements of the

selection model or the competencies):

how to analyse the job (job focus),

how to assess the person (competency focus) and

how to verify the success of prediction.

At this point I will only make a few notes on the first two elements.

Assessment of the job - Job Analysis

5 Not exactly. When Spencer and Spencer, p.241 describes the steps in developing a competency-based selection system, he refers to the “Validation of the Selection System” as “optional but desirable”.

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McClelland recently writes about one of his first competency project the following:

“When it came to assessing managerial competencies, it proved impractical to make on-

the-job observations and in any case we were interested in what executives were

thinking as well as in what we could see them doing. So we employed an intensive

interviewing technique - the Behavioural Event Interview or BEI - which was designed to

discover just what executives were thinking and doing as they went about their work.”

It seems e. g. from the work of Spencer and Spencer that there is good evidence, that

BEI is a useful tool to analyse what is essential in different jobs. But it doesn’t seem to be

the only possible solutions: direct observation (mentioned also by McClelland),

participation, questionnaires, document analysis etc. could also give useful information.

What SHL is suggesting here, is a good combination of detailed analyses and deep

insights into the essence of successful work: a unique combination of using expert

knowledge and the fresh look of outsiders to uncover not only what is the job, but also

what it could be.

Assessment of the person - Competencies

The new things in this field - beside again BEI - are the Competency Inventories.

Competency Inventories mainly differ from Personality Questionnaires in that they

consist of statements strongly related to behaviour at the workplace.

According to several authors (e.g. McClelland 1994, 1997, Barrett and Depinet 1991)

competency testing has not been a success - so far.

As Donald A. Schön (1992) in a “classic paper” writes: “Practitioners … may become

selectively inattentive to data incongruent with their theories, as some educators

preserve their confidence in ‘competency-testing’ by ignoring the kinds of competence

that competency-testing fails to detect.”

On the other hand our experience with the SHL competency tests are very positive:

they are not only easy to administer, very informative but also easy to communicate

their results to line manager. It is true though, that because SHL’s personality

questionnaire (the OPQ) is also intended to measure behavioural disposition at the

workplace, the results of the two questionnaires are quite interrelated.

Other valuable sources of information are the Assessment Centres, that provide

simulation exercises - usually in a situation with other people - requiring the participants

to generate the kind of behaviour they would display at the workplace. Based on this

behaviour the assessors can make judgements on the competencies the person

possesses out of those they believe to be necessary for successful work performance.

Again with SHL’s wide variety of Assessment Centre exercises one can fairly well

simulate a whole integrated day of a manager, for example. Assessment Centre seem to

be the best methodology today to assess competencies, although not without problems.

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Discussion of competence-based assessment often imply e.g. that assessor judgement

is only a minor issue because the assessment criteria could be so minutely and clearly

specified that one is well down towards the more mechanistic end of the spectrum.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Human behaviour varies hugely: thus any

assessment process is complex, incremental and - above all - judgmental. The way one

person’s playing of a piano is by definition not exactly the same as someone else would

do and cannot be judged mechanistically by either a written list of criteria, or to an

exemplar (Wolf 1996).

Another warning that we should take seriously comes from McClelland (1997) again: “I

cannot overemphasise the importance of recognising that there are alternative

combinations of characteristics that lead to success in a particular job. Too many

consultants and companies operate on the assumption that what we need to discover is

the one best set of competencies that leads to success. We are acting like ‘cookie-

cutters’. We are trying if we can pick or shape individuals to fit …. Yet everyone who has

been in a business for any length of time has observed instances in which the same job

has been performed very well by two people who appear to have quite different

characteristics. The fact is that often various combinations of competencies lead to

success.”

Diversity in unity

Although most of the time I was talking about the “competencies of a man”, we are

usually looking for a “competent man” (Boyatzis 1982). This is the very old and general

problem of science and reality: in principle science must methodologically disregard

the full complexity of reality. Science must treat man the same way. But it has to do it

with a full consciousness that a specific methodological approach has been chosen,

otherwise it can completely lead us astray (Frankl 1973, p. 134)

This simplified approach to reality could be called “Model”. The competency model used

by the Hay group is the Iceberg Model (Fig 2). It tries to illustrate, that “knowledge and

skill competencies tend to be visible, and relatively surface characteristics of people

while self-concept, trait and motive competencies are more hidden, ‘deeper’ and central

to personality” (Spencer and Spencer 1993, p. 11.). Actually this is a modification of the

well-known “onion-model”: which pictures man as an onion with many layers, retaining

the question, whether there is a “core” - e.g. the “real personality” - under all these

layers.

“Research conducted by SHL on the competency models of over 100 organisations led

to the development of the unique SHL Competency Map (Fig 3), giving an overview of

the different competencies required in roles throughout an organisation. The SHL

Competency Map provides a flexible conceptual framework for competency model

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development, ensuring that the competencies for any specific role can be viewed in the

context of your entire organisation (Fig 4 and 5). Used as part of the competency

development process, the Competency Map forms a powerful tool for exploring both the

current organisational situation and the ways in which the pattern of competencies

across the organisation will change in response to future business priorities and changes

in the competitive environments.” (SHL 1997).

But of course these are not the only ways we can conceptualise the relationship between

the parts (competencies) and the whole (competent).

John Raven is using the “chemistry analogy” for organising and combining

competencies. As he says, if we add copper and sulphur together the outcome

coppersulphid has non of the properties of the original elements.

Viktor E. Frankl is suggesting the use of “dimensional ontology”, not to disrupt the

wholeness and unity of man and still be able to study scientifically:

“Wherever we open the book of reality, we find it full of contradictions; reality is

portrayed differently on each page. Let me illustrate this by an optical image. Here are a

rectangle and a triangle set side by side (Fig 6). Even when we turn the page so that the

two figures are superimposed, they remain incongruous (Fig 7). Only when we include

the next higher dimension and set the page with the triangle upright so that it is

perpendicular to the page with the rectangle do the contradictions resolve themselves

(Fig 8). For we see that these two figures represents two different planes of the

projection of a pyramid (Fig 9).

The role of psychology: helping to improve the quality of life

“Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else,

men and women seek happiness.” - So begins Mihály Csíkszentmihályi his book about

“FLOW - the psychology of optional experience.“ Contrary to what we usually believe -

he says - the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to

its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal

experience is thus something that we make happen.”

On the individual level psychology has the very satisfying task to help people function

more often on this “optimal level”. On the organisational level, it is easier to make an

organisation function on optimal level if its members function on optimal level. On a

global level: we have a better chance to survive if organisations function on optimal

level (Raven 1995).

How can work affect the quality of life? With our “competency language” we could say:

“if we are really using our competencies”.

Csíkszentmihályi cites a writing of the Taoist scholar Chuang Tzu, who 2300 years ago

described, how Ting a butcher of Lord Hui of Wei prepared the meat:

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“Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of

his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee - zip! zoop! - He slithered

the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing

the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shon music.”

I think we can agree that this is an excellent example of a competent worker. But is it

only because he is so skilled? Not only. When Lord Wen-hui complimented Ting on his

great skill, he saying that it was a matter of skill, he answered: “What I care about is the

Way, which goes beyond skill.”

Then he described how he had achieved his superb performance: a sort of mystical,

intuitive understanding of the anatomy of the ox, which allowed him to slice it to pieces

with what appeared to be automatic ease: “Perception and understanding have come to

a stop and spirit moves where it wants.”

Which illustrates to me, that a competent worker is the one, who is present at the

workplace in his totality, in his “spirit”.

But it is not the whole story. A competent worker is always ready to face new challenges,

to acquire new skills. Chuang Tzu explain us how he achieved this transcendental

experience and spiritual playfulness: “However, whenever I come to a complicated

place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on

what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move my knife with the greatest of subtlety, until -

flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand

there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to

move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”.

Competency - a unique combination of skill, motivation, self, a unity of task and

personality.

Competency and Productivity

Erich Fromm (1979) in his book on “To have or to be” clearly differentiates between

“alienated” and “non-alieneted” activities. “In alienated activity I do not experience

myself as the acting subject of my activity; rather, I experience the outcome of my

activity - and that as something ‘over there’, separated from me and standing above and

against me. In alienated activity I do not really act; I am acted upon by external or

internal forces.

In non-alienated activity, I experience myself as the subject of my activity. Non-alienated

activity is a process of giving birth to something, of producing something and remaining

related to what I produce.”

This latter is what Fromm also calls “productive activity” (p.95):

“Productivness is a character orientation all human beings are capable of, to the extent

that they are not emotionally crippled. Productive persons animate whatever they touch.

They give birth to their own faculties and bring life to other persons and to things.”

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Competency in this sense is the ability to find meaningful work, or meaning in the

work. “The problem of subjectively meaningless, alienated, purely routinised work could

hardly arise for free Athenian - says Fromm. Their freedom implied precisely that

because they were not slaves, their activity was productive and meaningful to them.”

Aristotle, Thomas Aquinos, Master Eckhart all agree - says later - that “activity is

‘wholesome’ only when it is rooted in and express the ultimate ethical and spiritual

demands” (p. 96.)

“E. Mayo’s classics experiment has shown that even work which in itself is boring

becomes interesting if the workers know that they are participating in an experiment

conducted by an alive and gifted person who has the capacity to arouse their curiosity

and their participation. The same has been shown in a number of factories in Europe and

in the United States. The managers’ stereotype of the workers is: workers are not really

interested in active participation; all they want are higher wages, hence profit sharing

might be an incentive for higher work productivity, but not the workers’ participation.

While the managers are right as far as the work methods they offer are concerned,

experience has shown - and has convinced not few managers - that if the workers can be

truly active, responsible, and knowledgeable in their work role, the formerly uninterested

ones change considerably and show a remarkable degree of inventiveness, activity,

imagination and satisfaction.” (Fromm 1979)

The future of competency movement

Spady (1977) already long time ago called the competency movement “a bandwagon in

search of a definition”. At the 1996 International Competencies Conference (which was

co-sponsored by SHL Europe) 450 delegates from Europe and the USA met to discuss

their development and use of competency models. At the end of the Conference

Professor Paul Evans of the London Business School summed up the current situation as

follows:

“Over the last 15 years our understanding of competencies has become increasingly

complex. A lot of time and money has been spent on building more and more

sophisticated competency models. Competencies are in danger of becoming a

meaningless buzz-word, the new TQM. Unless companies can see a clear picture of the

business benefits to be gained from this approach, it will become discredited.” (SHL

1997)

Others, like Raven (1994) and Barrett and Depinet (1991) are strongly advocating, that

the movement should concentrate on identifying, nurturing and assessing the so called

“generic high-level competencies”, as initiative, problem-solving ability and the

ability to build up one’s own understanding of how the organisation and society in which

one works and lives operates and therefore intervene effectively in it.

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Probably we could agree, that if the competency movement will continue to concentrate

exclusively on the specific knowledge and skills required to be a competent travel clerk,

train driver, teacher or psychologist it will miss its target - since they are easily acquired,

rapidly outdated and contribute little to the difference between competent and

incompetent performance in an occupational role (Raven, 1996).

Alison Wolf in a recent paper writes in a similar mood about the Competence-based

assessment and education in the UK: “The idea of competence has become almost

inextricably linked, in the UK, with a particular assessment philosophy, promoted by the

National Council for Vocational Qualifications. This organisation has regarded

assessment as an extremely powerful weapon, capable on its own guaranteeing quality,

promoting a truly ‘competence-based’ approach to training and learning, and increasing

the skill level of the population. While they are certainly right about the powerful effect

of assessment on practice, their own approach has, unfortunately, had results quite at

odds with the ideals of those first promoting a competence-based approach”. ’Lead

industry bodies’ made up detailed descriptions of needed competencies which in time

became part of the national school system. In tern, schools were forced to teach these

well defined and easy to measure competencies instead of those more difficult to

measure but much more useful “high level” ones such as initiative or problem-solving

ability.6

Finally

I hope I could make it clear that it is not enough to attach the words “competency-

oriented” to the tools and procedures, which are already at hand to identify, nurture, and

test qualities previously described as knowledge, skills, aptitudes or personality. There

are two faces of the notion ‘competency’: from the point of view of the employee

competencies are the things one has to do in order to lead a successful life, while from

the point of view of the employer competencies are those things that differentiate

between more and less effective workers. Both opinion can be important but the most

important thing is to be aware of which point of view one takes. We hope, the

competency movement in the future will develop in both of these directions: building a

model about human competencies and defining the basic competencies required to

perform different types of occupational role effectively.

We are living in a rapidly changing world, so we have to face the future - which is scary

for most of us. It is in our human nature to want to deny inevitabilities and say “that 6 I agree with the Hungarian born mathematics educator Zoltán Dienes, that “knowing something does not consist of giving certain so-called correct answers to certain questions, but in being able to think in terms of models which have strong links with our experience of reality” (Klein 1980, p.13). This was leading Dienes to construct learning environments where these “high level competencies” could be fostered and myself trying to construct assessment tools to measure children’s attitude towards productivity, ambiguous problems, etc. (Klein 1993b, c).

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won’t happen in our lifetimes.” But it could happen this year or next, and when it does, it

will be a cataclysmic change for the industry and the way we do business (Champy,

1996).

“More than ever the key to global competitiveness will be the widespread capability of

institutions around the world to continuously transform.” (Tichy - Devanna, 1986)

The competent manager is more and more the “transformational leader” who is able to

keep his/her integrity while ready to reengineer the organisation.

Let me conclude this paper with a favourite American saying used equally by the

Alcoholics Anonymous in their prayers and the OD experts to underline the importance

of proactively, with the illustration taken from Kurt Vonnegut:

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Bibliography

Barrett, G.V. - Depinet, R.L. (1991) A reconsideration of testing for competence rather than intelligence. American Psychologist, 46 (10), pp.1012-1024

Boyatzis, R.E. (1982) The Competent Manager. Wiley, New York

Champy, J. (1996) Reengineering Management The Mandate for New Leadership. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., New York

Covey, S.R. (1990) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Restoring the Character Ethic. Simon Schuster, New York

Csikszentmihályi, M. (1990) FLOW The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Row Publishers, New York

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