Day #108

Collective Capability

Organisations are used to talking about capability, sometimes like the ingredients in a cake: indeed, they go to considerable trouble to analyse their desired state of performance and reduce it down to individual capabilities, held within a matrix, which form the foundations of recruitment and development.

This structural approach is valuable, but what if the nature of capability is, itself, changing?

It’s likely that, in the context of the radical connectivity and democratisation of the Social Age, capability is both individual and collective, and our Organisational approaches should adapt to match this trend.

An individual capability is that which you can do yourself, whilst a collective capability is that which can only be achieved with others. We may well be able to reduce it to component parts, but the ability to link it into performance may require others.

For example: an ability to hold ambiguity may be a collective capability, the ability to deliver quality may be collective, indeed innovation itself is collective as well as an individual capability.

A reason to differentiate is that Organisations may need to move from an ‘ownership’ to a ‘rental’ model of capability, engaging with the emergent Guilds and social collectives to access the capability that they desire.

Use your sixty seconds today to think about one thing you can only achieve yourself, and one thing that you can only do with others.

There is a nuance to this topic: we can certainly persist in our legacy view of capability, but the evolved view has significant impact on factors like footprint, infrastructure, contracting, and agility. So those Organisations that adopt it may have a competitive advantage - if they are able to identify what they need, and are willing to engage with those who can provide it, which will require a different mindset than a simple ownership one.