Competence 2.0- Resilience in the Face of Recession

Competing in the Post Recession Economy

Resilience in the Face of Recession
Education, Training and Workforce Development
for the Post-Recession Economy

With clear-eyed leadership, reinvented policies and practices, and shrewd stimulation, the American
economy will recover from our current crisis. But we will not thrive in the global economy if we do not
st
transform our policies, practices, jobs, industries, and competences for the 21 century. This reinvention
should be informed by the insights provided by the current crisis and the need to lift out of recession in a
fashion that positions America for future competitive advantage. In weathering recession, we must
sustain, enhance and leverage the innovations necessary to thrive in the future.

Today’s financial crisis offers several clear lessons. It has proved that being well-trained and
proficient in existing ways of doing business are not enough to assure the success of individuals,
enterprises, cities, regions and nations. Risks raised by incompetence or malfeasance in others and
systemic failures in judgment and practice and new developments must also be taken into account. Over
the next few years, long-established perspectives and practices in all sectors will have to adapt to
changing conditions and new solutions.

Luckily, a practical, scalable solution is emerging. Breakthroughs in technology and practice are
leading to what we call quot;Competence 2.0quot;. This involves new and powerful ways to acquire and track
high-importance news, insights, related skills and organizational routines. Competence 2.0 solutions
involve a far larger, more diverse group of people (not just a small group of today's managers) in tapping
early and deeply into multiple knowledge sources. These include communities of practice, which can
spot and take advantage of system-wide quot;weak signalsquot; of impending significant developments, be they
risks, changes, or opportunities. Resulting changes in perspective and practice must be rapidly, deeply
and surely embedded throughout enterprises.

The focus of leaders is shifting. The initial impulse to climb out of the recession by any means is
elevated to recover from the recession in ways that lead to greater insight and resiliency. This will require
new, sustainable perspectives, practices, and competences in virtually all industries and jurisdictions.
Especially critical will be changes to financial services and real estate, which will need to realign their
approaches to risk, transparency, and ethics. Other industries needing realignment include food
production and safety, energy, transportation, healthcare, hospitality and tourism, and retail. Leaders
must also anticipate and reflect the coming, transformative impacts of new technologies (genomic,
robotic, information, nano, and others) that will further change the rules of the game, over time.
Education, training and workforce development practices must be transformed to fulfill these imperatives.

Put simply, we are facing a “Big Switch” in perspectives, practices, and competences. Leaders,
enterprises, and political entities will all need to adapt to changing rules, redirect past practices, and
prepare for new approaches. This will be pervasive. In the spirit of “not wasting the current crisis” the Big
Switch will involve: 1) many dramatic changes in financial, business, and real estate practices and
services, 2) switching the relationship between global and local sources of production and information,
and 3) deploying a portfolio of other changes necessary to achieve environmental and financial
sustainability. To achieve the Big Switch, leaders must develop the capacity to forecast, acquire, and
sustain breakthrough competences and also create or protect jobs using those competences. They must
do so at a scale and speed that has never before been possible. The most successful leaders will be
those who create adaptive mechanisms for perpetual refreshment and expeditionary adjustment of these
skills and competences, deeply embedded in organizational processes.

We call these new practices Competence 2.0. They deal broadly and deeply with the concept of
competence and deploy the social tools and techniques of Web 2.0. These include ubiquitous
communication and computing, profoundly connected urban environments, powerful new forms of social

Education and Workforce Development 2 2/23/2009


networking and peer-to-peer learning technologies. Competence 2.0 is already revolutionizing education
and training. Moreover, it is also transforming other organizational processes: leadership development,
business process reinvention, strategic planning, executing strategy, and building organizational capacity,
for example. Using Competence 2.0, these processes will become instruments for adaptively engaging
large groups in planning for the future, changing their approaches to business practice, and assuring that
new practices are consistently deployed within Future Capitals, and across regions and nations.

Competence 2.0 provides a mechanism for sharing fresh perspectives and competences in ways
that span traditional organizational boundaries and practices. Competence 2.0 networks and
practices extend beyond single organizations and institutions to span industries, cities, nations, and
regions. They empower individuals to take greater responsibility for their competence and employability.
Moreover, these networks require the inclusion of new insights and competences at a far greater scale
and pace than traditional approaches. While traditional providers of education, training, and workforce
development are playing a role in the development of Competence 2.0 practices, the most impactful
applications will require new organizational structures and approaches.

Value Propositions for Competence 2.0
Competence 2.0 is fast, fluid, flexible, and affordable. We proclaim that Competence 2.0 is a critical
element in a leader’s toolkit in lifting out of today’s recession and assuring long-term growth. Its intelligent
use of advances in social resources and sense-making is the key ingredient that enables leaders to
achieve the following:

• Create newer, faster, smarter, cheaper approaches to creating high quality jobs for the future and
anticipating, acquiring, sharing, and refreshing competences among large groups;

• Enable previously unobtainable speed, scale, scope, and range in the development of new
competences;

• Add transparency and judgment to organizational decision making processes and create trip-wire
networks to detect risk-producing practices;

• Deeply embed these practices in their organizational cultures, achieving deeper, surer, truer
competences to improve productivity and performance within their specific contexts;

• Utilize new generations of performance metrics and action analytics™ to track competences and
link them to enhanced performance;

• Transform all organizational processes (education and training, leadership development,
business process reinvention, strategic planning, executing strategy, building organizational
capacity) into large-scale, adaptive learning opportunities;

• Establish new competence networks and communities of practice, fostering transformative
initiatives at the enterprise, industry, and city/region/nation levels;

• Leverage substantial, existing investments in information and communication technology
infrastructures, massively connected urban environments, and knowledge sharing tools and
techniques and shape future investments in infrastructure, capacity and competence.

This is the time to leverage innovation and reinvention. Shrewd leaders will utilize Competence 2.0
practices to create breakthroughs in financial sustainability and competitive advantage.



Understanding the Elements of Competence 2.0
Competence 2.0 is more than an artificially enhanced form of e-learning and e-training. While it can lead
to substantial enhancement in “time-to-competence”, its real importance is that it makes purposeful and
informed use of our capacity as social creatures. It’s about interactions, feedback, and sustained
conversations that are powerful, purposeful, and perpetual.

Competence 2.0 practices are building on existing processes and networks (learning, leadership
development, and strategic planning), combining new and reinvented elements. Competence 2.0
practices are emerging in a spectrum of settings ranging from individual enterprises to cities, regions,
industries, and nations. Competence 2.0 networks can span traditional boundaries, helping your as well
as others’ organizations to recognize and remedy gaps in their competences and weaknesses in their
practices that could hurt them as well as you. Many emerging Competence 2.0 initiatives are being
created today, building on existing learning and professional development networks.

New Infrastructures, Technologies, and Tools. Competence 2.0 is made possible by the latest
generation of Web 2.0-based infrastructures, technologies, and tools:

• Vastly more effective ways to track what is going on in internal and external environments and
improve your community’s knowledge base – this involves building on today’s techniques and
systems for tracking, forecasting, and managing technological and other changes, using
profoundly connected urban environments, social networking, and peer-to-peer technologies;

• Decision support and artificial intelligence tools that aid in spotting patterns; plus e-portfolios and
e-resumes, networked for cities, regions, and nations;

• Analytics and performance metrics that provide more powerful ways to track results and improve
performance; and

• Open resources for learning and competence that can be shared, repurposed, and combined.

New Techniques and Practices. These new tools enable a range of reinvented and/or new practices:

• Active mentoring, coaching, modeling of both successes and recovery from failures in particular
endeavors; Immersive, embedded, contextualized learning that tailors competence to specific
settings,

• Leveraging competence repositories (that provide access to resources on current competences)
and competence observatories (that provide foresight on emerging competencies that matter);
Competence-gap-based matching of learning needs and learning opportunities, which enable the
construction of personalized learning paths that drastically reduce the time to reach desired
competences.

• Learning “why” and learning “to be” as well as learning “what and how”; plus perpetual learning
and active demonstration of mastery, and capturing of such demonstrations;

• Blurring of boundaries between learning and work and between different organizational
processes; and

• Providing leadership in organizational redesign, building organizational capacity, and navigating
change.

Competence 2.0 leverages these new tools and techniques to create a range of valuable results.



Competence 2.0 Practices Produce Valuable Results

Faster, Smarter, Fresher Cheaper, Sharper, Clearer

• Utilize social networking dynamics and • Reinvent traditional “institutional” and “training”
technology-accelerated knowledge sharing to models for learning, assessment, and
assure speed, adaptability, and freshness certification. Unbundle so assessment and
certification can be handled separately from
• Use foresight processes and communities to learning.
predict future needs and dynamics, and to
target investments in future infrastructures, • Leverage peer-to-peer learning, open resources
practices, competences and communities, and mash-up technologies to
drive down cost and enable perpetual re-skilling.
• Create adaptive, rapidly responsive .
competence repositories, observatories, and • Empower learners and workers to assume
networks supported by active feedback greater responsibility for their own competence
mechanisms and employability.

• Share results with other organizations and • Focus attention sharply on “what is needed”
participate in competence communities that today and tomorrow, not “what is available” or
reach beyond individual enterprises. “what we used to do.”

• Focus on competences at any necessary level
(unskilled, semi-skilled, skilled trades and crafts,
both existing and emerging professions, high-
performing organization skills).

Deeper, Surer, Truer Broader, Greener, Richer

• Use designed and free-form social networks • Utilize the broadest definition of competences
st
to deeply embed competence in specific for the 21 century as described by Thomas
organizational contexts. Friedman in The World Is Flat – communication
skills, the capacity to work in inclusive teams,
• Focus on what makes a difference in specific the ability to perpetually learn, and a host of
contexts (create demonstrable outcomes, skills relating to sustainable economics.
success factors, and feedback loops tailored
to specific organizations). • Enable richer competence environments, as
needed, to stretch the range of competences
• Link embedded competence networks with all acquired by practitioners.
organizational processes.
• Capture emerging green skills and perspectives,
• Provide for perpetual refreshment of across multiple communities, and encourage
competences at all levels in the enterprise. their embedding in primary, secondary, and
tertiary education.



Examples of Competence 2.0 in Action in Different Settings

Capitals, Regions, Nations Industries

• State-Wide Work and Learning Networks. • Global Food Sourcing, Safety and
Example: Pervasive collaborations in State of Sustainability. Example: Food Safety
Minnesota, USA. Collaborations between K- Knowledge Network. A joint initiative between
12, post-secondary education, employers, and CIES – The Food Business Forum and the
workforce developers result in competence College of Agriculture at Michigan State
development. University (MSU) will reach food safety
Example: Oregon Open Campus. A workers all over the globe.
partnership, focusing on community, between
Oregon State University, the Association of • Real Estate, Urban Land Development, and
Oregon Counties, and many of Oregon’s Building Construction – Professional
community colleges, K-12 education systems, Development Networks. Example: Real
and local businesses. Estate Associates Network (REAP). A
Example: Regional Funding Collaborative for professional mentorship and apprenticeship
Workforce Development, National Fund for program sponsored by the Urban Land
Workforce Solutions. A major workforce Institute (ULI) in the USA can be leveraged
initiative through collaborations with local institutions
and extended to new regions.
• Regional Competency Networks.
Example: Nuventive USA and University of • Health Competence Networks. Example:
Nottingham, UK. East Midlands ePortfolio- Hematology Competence Network, European
based competency collaborations for Union. Continuous competence refreshment
education and employers. Portability of for hematology professionals in 19 EU nations.
qualifications across networks and places.

Individual Enterprises Education Enterprise Networks

• Embedded Leadership Development and • Serving the Underserved, Improving
Performance Enhancement Networks. Student Success. Example. Minnesota State
Examples: B.F. Saul Company and Marriott, Colleges and Universities. Several initiatives
Inc. in collaboration with Virginia Tech focus on learner success: Serving the
Cooperative Leadership Initiative, USA. Social Underserved and Backpacks to Briefcases.
networking and analytics/performance
simulation used to dramatically enhance • Effective Writing and Communication.
customer satisfaction and employee Example: Social Writing Application Program
satisfaction, performance, and retention. (SWAP) at Michigan State University. Social
networking and analytics improve writing skills.
• Entrepreneurship and Innovation Networks.
Examples: Intel Entrepreneurship and • Overcoming Shortages of Students in
Innovation Network and Global Shell Livewire Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Network. Provide students with best-in-class Math (STEM). Example: The Swedish
ideas on entrepreneurship and innovation Universities Math Portal (http://math.se).
globally. Provides students with an effective yet
thorough learning process with multiple
learning strategies.



Transforming Education, Training and Workforce Development
for the Post-Recession Economy
Competence 2.0 practices can be deployed to transform education, training, and workforce development.

1. Create enterprise- and/or industry-based competence communities to reinvent practices. For
example, pervasively reinventing practices in the financial services industry could be achieved by
Competence 2.0 networks that are industry-wide and/or enterprise-specific. Such efforts could involve
partnerships between professional and trade associations, governments, universities, and other
learning enterprises. The Food Safety Knowledge Network, created by the Food Business Forum and
Michigan State University, is a case in point. Real estate, healthcare, energy, transportation and
other industries could also benefit from such networks, building on existing initiatives.

2. Nurture embedded competence and leadership development networks in enterprises of all
kinds. Competence 2.0 approaches could be deployed to reinvent approaches to training,
competence building, talent management, and leadership development in almost any enterprise,
public or private, in any industry. Examples such as the practices deployed by the Virginia Tech
Cooperative Leadership Institute and others demonstrate the potential of these approaches.

3. Create “green career” networks. Competence 2.0 networks could be utilized to develop and
promulgate green careers skills, dealing with both the skills and jobs sides of the equation. These
could be made available to support learning by students in K-20 education or by people already in the
workforce. Existing, emergent green careers initiatives and enterprises could accelerate their
development by deploying Competence 2.0 approaches. Competence 2.0 green networks would be
decisively more cross-disciplinary and capture emerging competences faster than existing initiatives.

4. Sustain employment-focused social networks to support the preparation and transition of
critical populations. Members of the Armed Forces transitioning to civilian employment could be
included in Competence 2.0 networks that would engage them before, during, and after their
transition to civilian employment. Similarly, existing programs for transitioning the prison population
could be further enhanced by utilizing Competence 2.0 networks, dramatically reducing recidivism.

5. Leverage and accelerate the development of existing regional learning and work networks.
Most states support aggressive partnership efforts between education, workforce development
agencies, and employers to link and support work and learning. Deploying Competence 2.0 practices
can accelerate these developments. Potential candidates include the examples cited in the figure on
page 5: Minnesota State Colleges and Universities/State of Minnesota and Oregon Open Campus.

6. Improve the performance of at-risk students in traditional educational institutions. Virtually
every state has programs to improve the academic success of at-risk students. Substantial programs
are being supported by a host of philanthropic organizations. Competence 2.0 practices can be used
both to share and disseminate insights on “what works” in serving at risk students and in developing
the competence and capacity of such students. Social networked-based learning could engage at-risk
students in active, immersive learning experiences focusing on competences, early in their learning
careers and continuing through to transitions to employment.

7. Improve the financial sustainability of US public education. The financial model for affordable
public higher education is broken. Attaining financial sustainability requires deploying Competence
2.0 as part of the reinvention of PK-20 education, providing cheaper alternatives to traditional
instruction. In addition, time-to-degree can be reduced by bridging/pathways programs that enable
students to achieve associate degrees in 1 year and bachelors degrees in 3, dramatically reducing
remediation, and refocusing on active, immersive, competence-based learning. Similar techniques
can be used to grow enrollments in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).



The Competence 2.0 Community of Practice
Strategic Initiatives, Inc. has launched the Competence 2.0 Community of Practice, in order to:

• Raise the consciousness of leaders regarding the potential of community knowledge, intelligently
exploited, to support the pervasive reinvention of policies and practices that will lift economies out
of recession in a fashion that will position them for future competitive advantage;

• Build support around the imperative of sustaining, enhancing and leveraging the innovations in
processes and practices necessary to thrive in the post-recession future;

• Attract leading-edge practitioners of each of the elements of Competence 2.0 from all over the
globe who raise their capacity;

• Create, aggregate, and sustain a Competence 2.0 Body of Knowledge (BoK) as an open
resource, which is freely available to practitioners all over the world;

• Attract sponsors, investors, and leaders who wish to support Competence 2.0 applications in their
enterprises, organizations, and/or political jurisdictions;

• Raise and deploy funding to leverage, scale, and commercialize Competence 2.0 applications in
appropriate settings; and

• Raise funding and conduct research to assess the impacts of Competence 2.0 initiatives and to
disseminate results.

The concept of Competence 2.0 and the Community of Practice originated in the US and were discussed
at a workshop on “Competing on Competence” at the Future Capitals Summit held in Abu Dhabi, UAE on
January 13-15, 2009 and supported by the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The
workshop was coordinated by Dr. Donald M. Norris, President of Strategic Initiatives, who offered to
organize and coordinate the Competence 2.0 Community of Practice. Strategic Initiatives, Inc, has made
available the conceptual framework, case studies, and best practices that will catalyze the emerging
Competence 2.0 Community of Practice.

Dr. Norris will work with community members to develop an organizational structure and a code of
operation for the Community. Dr. Ambjorn Naeve, head of the Knowledge Management Research Group
at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden, is coordinating the collaborative environment and
Body of Knowledge for the Community of Practice. A variety of practitioners are participating in the
Competence 2.0 Community of Practice. These include practitioners associated with the examples cited
on page 5, many of the attendees from the Abu Dhabi workshop, and others. A portfolio of open
resources on Competence 2.0 and the Community of Practice is available at http://tinyurl.com/cj8gbm.

Competence 2.0 ® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Strategic Initiatives, Inc.,
which has made it available to the Competence 2.0 Community of Practice.


Competence 2.0- Resilience in the Face of Recession

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