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One of the key insights of Behavioral Interviewing [4], [5], [6] is that there is a difference between competencies and skills. The difference is simple. People can learn skills in a matter of months. People can’t learn competencies in less than several years. There aren’t many things that fall between — qualifications are almost always skills or competencies.
When organizing our team, this means that we needed to treat the two categories differently. Skills were transmitted extremely quickly around the team because we spent most of our time in Beginner’s Mind. We therefore assumed that any skill could be supplied by any member of our team.
Competencies, however, are unique to an individual. Many of them are even mutually contradictory. For example, it is difficult to find someone who is both Creative and good at Following a Process.
Behavioral Interviewing supplies us with around 30 such competencies. Every task requires more than one. Most tasks require three or four and could take advantage of a half-dozen or more. It is often impossible to find such a set in any two people, much less in any two people on the same team.
This understanding leads to the realization that Beginner’s Mind can’t provide everything needed to increase pair efficiency. Distinguishing between competencies and skills caused us to experiment with task ownership and assignment processes. We found processes that let us apply Beginner’s Mind to provide the skills, but still apply each competency when it was needed.
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Pair net is an effective means of knowledge transfer. While two people are paired, they share knowledge. When the pair splits for a pair swap, the knowledge then spreads to all four participants. In this way, knowledge will slowly but automatically spread around the group.
This knowledge transfer is automatic, and includes anything which comes up while a pair is working. The resulting network, pair net, tends to filter information for that which is used by the most people. The most useful information spreads the fastest.
In general, the most useful information gets passed in every pairing, and nearly all information is passed in a matter of a few pairings. Most of this information is passed in the first hour of a pairing.
As such, the primary limit on the rate of transmission is the number of different people that each person pairs with each day. It pays to be promiscuous.