Jobs need to be reframed into ‘challenge-response’ cycles to enable contribution

If one takes a job description, which describes “what one will do”, it does not distinguish between a worker and a contributor. If we shift this into challenge spaces and frame those challenges smartly, in a way that excites a competent man, and then talk in terms of what responses are made to those, suddenly we are talking a completely different language. For ‘challenge-response’, we need thinking and doing at the same time. Otherwise there will be only thinking or only doing. It is a shift in mode from action to challenge-response dynamics.

Even the high performers describe their work in terms of challenge-response cycles. In a week they are talking of 15 challenge-response cycles, and not of 10 things that they did. It starts from that simple shift. All the architecture is about enabling people to meet challenges enabling them to frame them, etc. to make things happen.

To understand challenges, we have to understand purposes. Actually if you re-map an organization in terms of challenge-response spaces, then you might find that though there may be 6 steps in the journey, there are only 3 morphologies of challenges e.g at the lower level the aptitude that is needed is one for troubleshooting, while the top one requires design as an approach. Therefore it may be possible that people who succeed at one morphology of challenge, do not succeed at the next morphology because it is not about contextual knowledge. The whole thing about people rising to their next level of “incompetence” is actually about “different competence”. It is because they have moved to a different morphology. It appears as progression, but there may be digression in organizations.