ICAP (The Intelligent Complex Adaptive Professional)
Research Underway: Exploration of the capabilities and skill sets that—when combined with
learning—will enable knowledge workers to create, leverage, manage and measure their own
knowledge for career success.
The knowledge worker is now recognized as a major part of the workforce; that is, those
workers who use their experience, education, and mental capacity to deal with the problems
and opportunities arising from complexity, uncertainty, and rapid change. As denoted by the
name, knowledge workers are individuals whose work effort is centered around creating, using,
and sharing knowledge. Over the past decade the focus on knowledge management has
encouraged organizations and workers to recognize the importance of knowledge in the
workplace, and to search for new capabilities and processes that ensure the increase and best
use of this resource for organizations.
Early data collected from 70 knowledge professionals at the eGov Community Meeting in
Washington, D.C. (2005), showed that this group of knowledge professionals are living and
working in a challenging and difficult environment. When the environment becomes difficult
knowledge becomes critical. Additionally, as the overall data indicates, this community of
knowledge professionals possesses characteristics that serve them well in a CUCA environment.
Presentation introducing PKM (PowerPoint, 15 slides)
Overview of Data Response (PowerPoint, 2 pages)
Data Explication (PDF, 2 pages)
Response
to Exercise "Actions that you could take to further empower yourself as a
Knowledge Professional" (PDF, 3 pages)
Intelligent Complex Adaptive Professionals relate in a new way to their organization and
other knowledge workers. They bring personal experience, uniqueness, and diverse
perceptions, capabilities, and opportunities to their organization. A strong sense of self is
essential for productive interactions, open communication and personal improvement
and—when accompanied by a willingness to learn and collaborate—will provide the foundation
for organizational flexibility and growth. Simultaneously, the organization will need to support a
culture of sharing ... it is the exchange of knowledge that leverages knowledge and produces
intelligent behavior as an organization. As their careers evolve, worker responsibilities will
increase and their knowledge will become broader. At the same time, the environment will
become more dynamic and challenging, necessitating additional cognitive and behavioral skills
well beyond logic, analysis and authoritative management. For career success, knowledge
workers must become multidimensional, expanding their competencies beyond their
professional disciplines.
Our dear friend and mentor Dr. Charles Seashore (affectionately known as Charlie) focused a
good deal of attention on Self, and in our work on Knowing (see the Publications Section) we
focused on Self as an Agent of Change. Perhaps even a larger need is to learn the fullness of
who we are, the amazing capabilities we seem to have to handle anything that life throws our
way!
Managing
Self in Troubled Times (PDF, 33 pages)
For a new age, a new set of integrative competencies provide connective tissue, creating the
knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors that support and enhance other competencies. These
integrative competencies have a multiplier effect through their capacity to enrich the
individual's cognitive abilities while enabling integration of other competencies, leading to
improved understanding, performance, and decisions.
Integrative competencies can be understood from two perspectives. The first is from the
individual's viewpoint. Here the competencies help the individual to deal with the larger, more
complex aspects of their organization and its environment. They either integrate data,
information, or knowledge to give the individual more capability or they help the individual
perceive and comprehend the complexity around them by integrating and clarifying events,
patterns, and structures in their environment. From the organization's view the integrative
competencies help strengthen the organization's capacity to deal with its environment by
creating programs, networks and cultures that pull together capabilities that can more
effectively handle uncertainty and complexity. Integrative competencies that the Institute has
focused on are Systems and Complexity Thinking, Learning, Knowing, Relationship Network
Management and Knowledge Management. Review the Publications pages for papers in these
areas.
The multidimensionality of an organization—which translates into how well they can respond
and interact with a dynamic complex environment—depends on the multidimensionality of its
knowledge workers. Certainly one aspect of multidimensionality is the knowledge worker's
capabilities to work in multiple domains simultaneously, moving in and out of those domains as
needed, combining the physical, the mental, the intuitive, and the emotional to continuous
expand their knowledge, capabilities, capacity, networks and perceptions. (See graphic on
Continuously Expanding Multidimensionality of the Knowledge Worker (1 PowerPoint slide).
But the multidimensionality concept also connects deeply to those abilities beyond
our conscious mind. We begin to move toward this understanding in our treatment that
introduced Knowledge Capacities.
MULTIDIMENSIONALITY:
Building the Mind/Brain/Body Infrastructure for the Next
Generation Knowledge Worker (PDF, 17 pages)
Other related papers are available in the ICAP area of the Publications section.
Key Definitions
Adaptation is the process by which an organization improves its capacity to survive and grow
through internal adjustments. Adaptation may be responsive, internally adjusting to
external forces, or it may be proactive, internally changing so that it can influence the
external environment.
Complexity is the condition of a system, situation, or organization that is integrated with some
degree of order but has too many elements and relationships to understand in simple
analytic or logical ways.
Knowledge Workers are individuals whose work effort is centered around creating, using, and
sharing knowledge.
Personal Knowledge Management refers to the individual and their personal capacity to
continuously learn, adapt and manage their knowledge for professional and personal
success.
If there is any part of this collection of thoughts that you do not understand or would
like to discuss, please call 304-799-7267 and ask for David or Alex. If we are not
available please leave your name and phone number and we will return your call as
soon as possible. You may email Alex at alex@mountainquestinstitute.com
