An Agile Mind - [website] Published: 11th of May 2011 by: (c) Staff Training Reporter
‘Learning agility’, like what is required of undercover police officers, is the ability to learn wholly new competencies required for first-time, challenging conditions on the fly.
In undercover police work officers are often required to take on whole new personas, living completely different lives during the course of their investigations.
In the film Miss Congeniality Sandra Bullock plays a rough FBI agent tasked with going undercover as a beauty pageant contestant to solve a murder, going against the kind of life she was used to living as a cop. This is an example of learning agility.
But learning agility, while being useful to those in law enforcement (and movies about law enforcement), is also an invaluable tool for organisations to predict potential higher-level staff and their success rates.
Cognitive ability, personality, simulation, role play and multi-rater assessment instruments and techniques that evaluate strengths and weaknesses are all useful when predicting who will climb to higher levels in the organisation (and stay there), but on its own learning agility is the single best predictor of prolonged success.
How you identify those with learning agility comes down to a number of traits. They will be critical thinkers, will know themselves well, will deliver results first time around and will be comfortable experimenting outside of their comfort zones.
According to Best People Practices for Managers and HR by Eichinger, Lombardo and Ulrich, those with learning agility will possess self-confidence and honesty (to be able to examine oneself and realise one’s limits and abilities), self-awareness and self-discipline.
“It [learning agility] comes from a constant thirst for improvement and a capacity to have new insights from almost every job experience.”
Best Practices for Managers and HR adds, however, that the results of a learning agility test are not related to IQ or intelligence, so grades from school and cognitive ability tests should be used in conjunction to determine intelligence.
