Business Architecture, Inc.

Competency Framework

"Executives who want to bridge the gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to innovation need to define it as a capability-building problem that is truly systemic and that will require the same kind of energy, commitment, persistence, and investment that they brought to their other capability-building challenges, such as quality, customer service, or supply chain management."
 – Gary Hamel
Strategic Management Competency Framework:
Strategic Management Competency Framework This framework is made up of the business design construct, the strategic management process, and the people's capabilities. The process creates the business design while the business design guides and informs the process.
Print this page

A Framework for a Strategic Management Competency – An Engine for Wealth Creation

Strategic management is about much more than following a predefined process to produce a strategy, a business design, a strategy map, and a deployment plan. It is about the development of a competency which makes the process the organization's own and makes it capable of producing the anticipated level of quality in its result, namely a sustainable competitive advantage.

Fundamental Framework Elements

A strategic management competency repeatedly generates competitive business designs and enables the organization to deploy the new designs, sustaining a competitive advantage. There are three interrelated elements making up this competency.

  • First is the business design construct, a comprehensive generic business model, the schema of a business organization. This model provides the "guiding light" for innovative business design, prompting the creative thinking needed for innovation.
  • The second element of a strategic management competency is the strategic management process. This provides the structure for the activities which develop strategies and associated business designs. This guide to the activities not only produces the innovative business design but builds the organization's strategic management competency.
  • The third element of this competency is capable people. The people's capabilities provide the leadership, management, innovation, and business design knowledge needed to produce and sustain a competitive advantage.

Element Integration & Synergy

With the integration of these three elements, management has the framework for what it takes to develop and sustain a competitive advantage.

  • The strategic management process creates the business design
  • the business design construct guides and informs the strategic management process
  • the people's capabilities enable the effective execution of the process
  • the people's participation in the process builds their skills, knowledge, and understanding to both
  • develop more innovative business designs
  • improve the strategic management process itself

Thus the competency grows.

Competency Development Cycle

The participants improve their systems thinking skills, which enable them to understand and manage complexity. As they use iterative inquiry, they are "learning to learn" more effectively. This skill enables them to tackle the most complex issues and arrive at new levels of understanding and innovation. They also build skills which enable them to design and develop more unique and competitive businesses. Finally, they use the skills and knowledge they gain from executing the strategic management process to improve the process itself, tailoring it to their level of understanding, their organization, and their business.

The three aspects joined together are called a framework rather than a blueprint, because it is a guide, not a precise prescription.