I have been working with a number of organisations lately developing their internal capability to be responsive to change. One of the key leverage points for building and maintaining change readiness capability is skill change agents working across your business.

The literature on human resource and organizational development, contains numerous models of competencies necessary for practitioners in the field of organizational change and transformation. My review of this field and the practical applications suggests that there is an intricate and complex web of skills necessary to efficiently and effectively engage in a complex organizational system.

I have been able to identify 8 key capabilities and over 100 associated competencies, tools and techniques that will allow an individual to engage effectively as a "change agent" in an adaptive organizational environment. The 8 key capabilities that I discovered included:

• Improved personal practice
• Build and nuture team effectiveness
• Effectively interact with clients and the organizational system.
• Understand, plan and enable organizational change.
• Establish a vision of possibility and the means to achieve the result
• understand and use the key elements of continuous improvement in performance management.
• Collect and interpret information.
• Ongoing inquiry.

I will now explore in greater detail each of the capabilities that make up an effective and efficient change agent in complex, adaptive environments. I wanted to start by discussing how change agents can improve their personal practice.

In terms of creating a dynamic and adaptive change agent capability is essential for change agents to improve their personal practice. The literature in this area is quite clear, researchers such as Arygris have spent the last 25 years developing a theory of individual and organizational learning in which human reasoning, not just behavior, becomes the basis for diagnosis and action.

Argyris is an American organizational psychologist, whose special area is the personal development of individual and organisaitonal learning and the defense mechanisms that managers and team leaders, often unwittingly use to resist change.

Argyris's pioneering work in the field of action science offers a strong and sound basis for the skills, techniques and tactics to improve personal practice. The key skills and competencies for a change agent, based on Chris Argyris's work include being able to recognize and intervene in real-time. The two important personal development tools here are left-hand column technique and ladder of inference.

These two techniques are fundemental to an effective change agent as they allow the agent to intervene in real time and openly challenge individual, group and organisaitonal norms and defensive mechanisms.