Sustainable competitive advantage derives from strenuous efforts to identify, cultivate, and exploit an organization's core competencies. Opportunities exist in strategy development, management techniques, collaboration mechanisms, knowledge sharing and learning, and knowledge capture and storage.

1. The views expressed in this presentation are the views of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Asian
Development Bank, or its Board of Governors, or the governments they represent. ADB does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included
in this presentation and accepts no responsibility for any consequence of their use. The countries listed in this presentation do not imply any
view on ADB's part as to sovereignty or independent status or necessarily conform to ADB's terminology.
A Competency-Based
Approach to Managing
Olivier Serrat
2014

2. Contents
Competence is a specific
range of knowledge, skills,
or behaviors utilized to
improve performance and
sustainable competitive
advantage derives from
strenuous efforts to
identify, cultivate, and
exploit an organization's
core competencies. ADB's
Knowledge Solutions series
aims to build competencies
in:
Strategy
Development
Management
Techniques
Collaboration
Mechanisms
Knowledge Sharing
and Learning
Knowledge Capture
and Storage

3. Contents
• Behavior and Change
• Emergence and Scenario
Thinking
• Institutional Capacity and
Participation
• Knowledge Assets
• Marketing
• Organizational Learning
• Partnerships and Networks
of Practice
Strategy
Development
• Branding and Value
• Complexity and Lateral
Thinking
• Linear Thinking
• Organizational Change
• Talent Management
Management
Techniques

4. Contents
• Collaborative
Tools
• Communities of
Practice and
Learning
Alliances
• Leadership
• Social
Innovations
• Teamwork
Collaboration
Mechanisms
• Creativity,
Innovation, and
Learning
• Learning and
Development
• Learning
Lessons
• Dissemination
Knowledge
Sharing and
Learning
• Knowledge
Harvesting
• Reporting
• Technology
Platforms
Knowledge
Capture and
Storage

5. Behavior and Change
• Culture Theory
How can a strategy focus on group relationships
with appreciation of their distinctive ideas, beliefs,
values, and knowledge?
• The Most Significant
Change Technique
How can it utilize stories of significant change to
monitor and evaluate performance?
• Outcome Mapping
How might it shift the focus from changes in state to
changes in behaviors, relationships, actions, and
activities?
• Political Economy Analysis
for Development
Effectiveness
Why should it embrace the complex political nature
of decision making to investigate how power and
authority affect economic choices in a society?
• The Sustainable
Livelihoods Approach
How could you anchor it in understanding of
livelihoods and appreciation of the factors that
constrain or enhance these as well as their
relationships?

6. Emergence and Scenario Thinking
• Future Search
Conferencing
How might futurizing enable diverse and potentially
conflicting groups find common ground for
constructive action?
• Design Thinking
Is your strategy the outcome of a human-centered,
prototype-driven process for the exploration of new
ideas?
• From Strategy to Practice
Does it maintain a balance between strategizing and
learning modes of thinking?
• Past Visions of Rural Asia's
Future
How can one formulate strategic efforts to effect
change when they are constantly challenged by
emerging forces?
• The Premortem
Technique
Working backward, does it integrate alternatives
that emerge from the perspective of future failure?
• Reading the Future
How emergent is it? Does it consider other
scenarios?
• Theories of Change
How can one navigate the complexity of social
change to intended results?

7. Institutional Capacity
and Participation
• Building Institutional
Capacity for
Development
How does a strategy promote participation at
requisite levels?
• On Resilient
Organizations
How might investments in leadership and culture,
networks, and change readiness build resilience to
survive and thrive in turbulent times?

8. Knowledge Assets
• Auditing Knowledge
Is your strategy for knowledge management
enriched by regular knowledge audits?
• Enhancing Knowledge
Management Strategies
Does its practice integrate the need to
systematically review, evaluate, prioritize,
sequence, manage, redirect, and if necessary even
cancel strategic initiatives?
• Linking Research to
Practice
Is your approach to dissemination underpinned by
policy, strategy, planning, and tactics? How can
your knowledge products be made available in a
flexible range of formats in recognition of the
varied needs of consumers?
• A Primer on Intellectual
Capital
How might you realize your organization's true
value?

9. Marketing
• The Future of Social
Marketing
How does a strategy apply a custom blend of the
four Ps and other marketing techniques to
transform communications with stakeholders and
improve performance?
• Marketing in the Public
Sector
How might it draw on marketing principles to
effect changes in the behavior of individuals or
groups?

10. Organizational Learning
• Building a Learning
Organization
How can a strategy support and energize
organization, people, knowledge, and technology
for learning?
• Learning Lessons with
Knowledge Audits
How might it integrate evaluation results to support
policy, strategy, and operational changes?
• Overcoming Roadblocks
to Learning
How could it distinguish roadblocks to make them
part of the solution instead of part of the problem?
• Seeking Feedback on
Learning for Change
How would you gauge perceptions of competencies
to learn for change?

11. Partnerships
and Networks of Practice
• Creating and Running
Partnerships
Does your strategy leverage partnerships and
recognize their drivers of success and failure?
• Social Network Analysis
How might it make out social networks and
analyze the actors and the relationships between
them?

12. Branding and Value
• Managing Corporate
Reputation
Why, in knowledge-based economies, should high-
performance organizations reconceptualize notions
of corporate reputation?
• New-Age Branding and
the Public Sector
How might we embrace branding to drive
organizational behavior and behavioral change?
• Value Cycles for
Development Outcomes
Do value cycles maximize the potential of
knowledge services and knowledge solutions
through delivery platforms?

13. Complexity and Lateral Thinking
• The Five Whys Technique
How might we investigate deeply the cause-and-
effect relationships underlying problems?
• On Decision Making
If decision making is a stream of inquiry, not an
event. how might one move toward decision-driven
organizations?
• The Reframing Matrix
Do you enable different perspectives to be
generated and applied in management processes?
• The SCAMPER Technique
How might one brainstorm to resolve a problem,
meet an opportunity, or turn a tired idea into
something new and different?
• Seeding Knowledge
Solutions Before, During,
and After
By what effective questioning might you reap
insights into strategy development, management
techniques, collaboration mechanisms, knowledge
sharing and learning, and knowledge capture and
storage?
• Understanding
Complexity
Why should management practices encompass
sense and decision making in multiple contexts?

14. Linear Thinking
• Crafting a Knowledge
Management Results
Framework
How can we manage for results with a coherent
framework for strategic planning, management, and
communications?
• Focusing on Project
Metrics
How does one focus on time, cost, human
resources, scope, quality, and actions as common
parameters of project performance?
• Output Accomplishment
and the Design and
Monitoring Framework
Do you make use of logic models for objectives-
oriented planning that structures the main
elements in a project, highlighting linkages between
intended inputs, planned activities, and expected
results?
• The Perils of Performance
Measurement
What are some pernicious effects of performance
measurement and how might one improve the
state of the art?

15. Organizational Change
• Business Model
Innovation
What are business models and how might they
enable organizations to capture, create, and deliver
value to meet explicit or latent needs?
• Engaging Staff in the
Workplace
In what ways do organizations benefit from staff
engagement and how might that be driven?
• Fast and Effective Change
Management
How do organizations overcome resistance to
change and secure as much discretionary effort as
possible?
• Forestalling Change
Fatigue
If transformation change rarely succeeds, what
rationale is there for bottom-up approaches?
• Innovation in the Public
Sector
How might the public sector innovate to be
competent in the present and ready for the future?
• Knowledge as Culture
How might knowledge management initiatives
impact an organization's social reality to drive
change?

16. Organizational Change
• Managing Knowledge in
Project Environments
If a project exists only for its duration, how might
project-based organizations reconcile the project-
centric nature of their work to also promote
organizational learning?
• Moral Courage in
Organizations
What is moral courage and why is it so often
constrained in organizations?
• Notions of Knowledge
Management
How do we get the right knowledge to the right
people at the right time, and help them (with
incentives) to apply it in ways that strive to improve
organizational performance?
• Picking Investments in
Knowledge Management
How might you prioritize investments in knowledge
management?
• A Primer on Corporate
Governance
Why do organizations need direction and control
and based on what principles and practices might
boards of directors better provide that?

17. Organizational Change
• A Primer on
Organizational Culture
What are the components of organizational culture
and what is the role of organizational learning for
change?
• A Primer on
Organizational Learning
How do organizations learn?
• The Roots of an Emerging
Discipline
How do new knowledge management paradigms
compare with the old, and what new structures and
managerial attitudes do they require?
• Sparking Innovations in
Management
Why should we drive management innovation?
• The Travails of
Micromanagement
Why is micromanagement mismanagement?

18. Talent Management
• Conducting Effective
Meetings
Do you manage meetings before, during, and after,
with appreciation of their different kinds, to make
them productive and fun?
• Growing Managers, Not
Bosses
Should one spend more time, integrity, and
brainpower on selecting managers than on anything
else?
• Leading Top Talent in the
Workplace
Is your organization attractive to people who
already know how valuable they are?
• Managing Knowledge
Workers
Why should you empower knowledge workers to
make the most of their deepest skills and perform
best?

19. Talent Management
• Managing by Walking
Around
How does one manage by walking around to
emphasize the importance of interpersonal
contact, open appreciation, and recognition and
build civility and performance in the workplace?
• A Primer on Talent
Management
How can one give talent strategic and holistic
attention to make it happen?
• Understanding and
Developing Emotional
Intelligence
Do you have the ability, capacity, skill, or self-
perceived ability to identify, assess, and manage
the emotions of yourself, of others, and of groups?

20. Collaborative Tools
• Collaborating with WikisHow do you harness the power of collaborative
minds to innovate faster, cocreate, and cut costs?
• Drawing Mind Maps
How does one represent, link, and arrange
concepts, themes, or tasks under a central topic?
• Wearing Six Thinking Hats
How can we actualize the thinking potential of
teams?

21. Communities of Practice
and Learning Alliances
• Building Communities of
Practice
How do you build a community of like-minded,
interacting people to ensure more effective
creation and sharing of knowledge in a domain?
• Enriching Knowledge
Management
Coordination
Through what collaboration mechanisms can one
decentralize the span of knowledge coordination?
• Improving Sector and
Thematic Reporting
How can communities of practice report better?
• Learning in Strategic
Alliances
Why should strategic alliances manage the
partnership, not just the agreement, for
collaborative advantage?

22. Communities of Practice
and Learning Alliances
• On Networked
Organizations
Why are hierarchy, market, and network forms of
organization not mutually exclusive?
• A Primer on Social
Neuroscience
How does social neuroscience foster more
comprehensive theories of the mechanisms that
underlie human behavior?
• Surveying Communities
of Practice
How might one design and analyze a survey of
communities of practice?

23. Leadership
• Building Trust in the
Workplace
How should we earn, develop, and retain trust for
superior results?
• Distributing Leadership
How can one distribute leadership if it is an
outcome, not an input to business processes and
performance?
• Exercising Servant
Leadership
Why would you support people who choose to
serve first, and then lead, as a way of expanding
service to individuals and organizations?
• Leading in the Workplace
What is the new context for leadership in the public
sector?

24. Social Innovations
• Appreciative Inquiry
By what process can one unearth what works to
facilitate positive change in organizations?
• Fighting Corruption with
ICT: Strengthening Civil
Society's Role
How might development agencies strengthen civil
society-led, ICT-driven anticorruption initiatives?
• Sparking Social
Innovations
How can you generate good ideas that meet
pressing unmet needs and improve people's lives
to foster smart, sustainable globalization?

25. Teamwork
• Action Learning
How do you enable small groups to work regularly
and collectively on complicated problems, take
action, and learn as individuals and as a team while
doing so?
• Bridging Organizational
Silos
How might one bridge silos to promote effective
cross-functional teams?
• Conflict in Organizations
What are the roots of organizational conflict and
how might complexity thinking help capitalize on its
functions and dysfunctions?
• Delegating in the
Workplace
Why, in organizations, is it better to understand
delegation as a web of tacit governance
arrangements?
• Informal Authority in the
Workplace
How can reciprocity intensify mutual influence in
organizations?

26. Teamwork
• Managing Virtual Teams
How can we organize and coordinate with effect a
group whose members are not in the same location
or time zone, and may not even work for the same
organization?
• On Organizational
Configurations
What configuration does your organization have
and what does that tell you? What might you do to
enhance the strengths and minimize the
weaknesses of its structure?
• A Primer on Corporate
Values
What role can corporate values play in guiding
behavior and decision-making?
• Working in TeamsHow does one develop a successful team?

27. Creativity, Innovation,
and Learning
• Building Networks of
Practice
What are the forms and functions of networks of
practice and how do you monitor and evaluate
performance?
• Dimensions of the
Learning Organization
How do you harness, individually or in association,
useful models of learning and change to reflect on
the dimensions of a learning organization?
• Drawing Learning
Charters
How can an organization demonstrate commitment
to learning, against which provision and practice
can be tested and serve as a waymark with which to
guide, monitor, and evaluate progress?
• Harnessing Creativity and
Innovation in the
Workplace
What are the stimulants and obstacles to creativity
and innovation that drive or impede enterprise in
organizations?

28. Creativity, Innovation,
and Learning
• Learning in Conferences
How might event planners shine a light on learning
outcomes?
• On Internal Knowledge
Markets
Why is intrinsic motivation necessary to drive
internal knowledge markets?
• On Knowledge Behaviors
Why must motive, means, and opportunity be
aligned to invest resources productively across the
knowledge-sharing landscape?
• Social Media and the
Public Sector
How can the public sector use Web 2.0 applications
to forge, build, and deepen relationships?
• Toward a Library
Renaissance
Challenged by the internet, how might libraries
worldwide reconsider the products and services
they offer?

29. Learning and Development
• Coaching and Mentoring
How can we coach and mentor to inspire and
empower employees, build commitment, increase
productivity, grow talent, and promote success?
• E-Learning and the
Workplace
Can better understanding of organizational
environments and design principles improve e-
learning interventions?
• Learning and
Development for
Management
What are the five functions of managers toward
which learning and development can be extended
to improve their insights, attitudes, and skills?
• Learning in a Flash
How can we provide a social context to motivate
learners and improve cognition and recall?

30. Learning Lessons
• Asking Effective QuestionsHow do you know what question to ask when?
• Conducting After-Action
Reviews and Retrospects
When a critical milestone has been reached, why
should we discuss successes and failures in an open
and honest fashion?
• Conducting Successful
Retreats
How does one step back from day-to-day activities
to think about the future?
• Conducting Peer Assists
How can individuals come together to share their
experiences, insights, and knowledge on an
identified challenge or problem?
• Embracing FailureIs failure a way to an opportunity?

31. Learning Lessons
• Identifying and Sharing
Good Practices
How can one suggest that a process or
methodology that has been shown to be effective
in one part of an organization and might be
effective in another too?
• Learning from Evaluation
How might evaluation serve as a foundation block
in learning organizations?
• Learning Histories
How might one surface the thinking, experiments,
and arguments of actors who engaged in
organizational change?
• Storytelling
What is the potential of stories or narratives as a
communication tool to value, share, and capitalize
on the knowledge of individuals?

32. Dissemination
• Communications for
Development Outcomes
How can strategic communications explain activity
and connect to purpose in more instrumental ways?
• Conducting Effective
Presentations
How can an ordinary presentation become a lively
and engaging event?
• Disseminating Knowledge
Products
By what interactive process does one communicate
knowledge to target audiences to lead to change?
• Enriching Policy with
Research
How can we enrich the definition, design, and
implementation of policy research?
• Posting Research Online
How do you employ the internet to disseminate
research findings?
• Using Plain English
How do we save time in writing, make writing far
easier, and improve understanding?

33. Knowledge Harvesting
• Conducting Exit
Interviews
How do you garner feedback on why employees
leave, what they liked about their job, and where
the organization needs improvement?
• The Critical Incident
Technique
How can the study of critical incidents help solve
practical problems?
• Critical Thinking
By what process can one analyze and evaluate
thinking to improve it?
• Glossary of Knowledge
Management
What, in simple terms, are the most common
concepts in knowledge management?
• Harvesting Knowledge
How do you draw out and package tacit knowledge
to help others adapt, personalize, and apply it; build
organizational capacity; and preserve institutional
memory?

34. Knowledge Harvesting
• On Second Thought
Why might groups and organizations benefit from
social reminiscing?
• Showcasing Knowledge
Why should one cut information overload and
showcase knowledge?
• Staff Profile Pages
How do we build dynamic, adaptive electronic
directories that store information about the
knowledge, skills, experience, and interests of
people?
• Taxonomies for
Development
How might taxonomy work become strategic work?

35. Reporting
• Assessing the
Effectiveness of
Assistance in Capacity
Development
How can one garner feedback from executing
agencies on the effectiveness of assistance in
capacity development?
• Monthly Progress Notes
By what simple feedback mechanisms might you
promote learning before, during, and after to
document accomplishments as well as
bottlenecks?

36. Technology Platforms
• Writing Weblogs
How can groups discuss electronically areas of
interest and review different opinions and
information surrounding a topic?

37. Further Reading
• ADB. 2008–. Knowledge Solutions. Manila.
www.adb.org/knowledgesolutions
• ——. 2008–. Knowledge Solutions. Manila.
www.adb.org/publications/series/knowledge-solutions
• ——. 2010. Compendium of Knowledge Solutions. Manila.
www.adb.org/publications/compendium-knowledge-solutions

38. Quick Response Codes
@ADB
@ADB Sustainable
Development Timeline
@Academia.edu
@LinkedIn
@ResearchGate
@Scholar
@SlideShare
@Twitter