What is learning agility...truly?

I am starting to see the term "learning agility" thrown around by some talent management technology vendors and even a few clients that are trying to mature in their succession planning capabilities.

The very basic idea, as I know it, is that a person's openness to new ideas and situations and ability to learn quickly is indicative of their potential to move into more complex roles. Higher level roles tend to be more generalist in nature and require an ability to pick up and apply new concepts on-the-fly.  Thus, they say, the importance of learning agility for succession planning.

Let's get one thing clear, however. Learning agility is only really useful as a label or a sound bite - as an easy way of conveying what I just mentioned. 

Beyond that, it poops out in its importance because it fails to explain anything that can't be explained by other factors that we have already been measuring for a very long time.  I bet you can guess what those are... that's right... cognitive ability and personality!

Call it openness, curiosity, gumption, moxie, brains, smarts, learning agility, mental horsepower, genius, whatever.  Just know that if you want to measure it, measuring it directly via proven and universally accepted cognitive ability tests and personality inventories is the most reliable way to go.

 

Comments

[mike]

Thanks so much for your comments and the link, Meg. I do believe that creating and using these types of conceptual labels is helpful from a communication/change management standpoint. The problems I see are:

1) How do you measure it? Creating a new survey/tool for measuring growth mindset, for example, is likely to seem straightforward until issues such as validity and legal defensibility come to the fore. Certainly, you'll eventually want to know whether growth mindset really is a good predictor of potential in your company, both from a compliance and a "how effective are our HR practices?" standpoint, and that takes many years and a significant investment to figure out.

2) Potential comes in many shapes and sizes. The traditional tendency is to believe that potential, much like leadership in general, is something singular and universal that can be pinned down once and for all, but research tells us that's not really the case. If you start asking, "potential for what?," you start seeing that different answers yield different indicators of potential. So using measures that are broad and dynamic enough to capture the many meaningful possibilities is important.

[Meg Bear]

Maybe so, but consider Amy's post and the idea of a "growth mindset". Sure we can agree that this is the intersection of ability and personality but I think that is a useful way to think about it.

http://talentedapps.wordpress.com/2008/03/25/is-high-potential-a-label-or-a-mindset/