A competency network is a map of the gifts people bring to each other.
Everyone is good at different things. Everyone knows different things. Everyone has gaps where others are strong.
A competency network makes that visible.
It tracks:
- Who is good at what
- Who trusts whom with which kinds of questions
- Who to go to when you need help
When a group builds a competency network, people stop pretending to know things they don’t know. They start finding the right person instead of guessing alone.
Different kinds of minds see different parts of the world. A competency network lets those different views work together. What one person misses, another catches. What one person can’t do, another can.
This is not about ranking people. It is not about who is better or worse. It is about fit, trust, and seeing each other clearly.
You can think of it as the gifts that people bring to life by relating to each other.
All healthy and resilient institutions have a well-functioning competency network (Laloux 2014; Wilson 2015). A good way to understand competency networks is via the notion of trustworthiness and the nurturing and maintenance of trusted relationships (Bettin and Elliffe 2016). A competency network can be formalised as a directed graph of experience-based pair-wise trustworthiness ratings in relation to various domains between the members of a group. You can think of it as the gifts that people bring to life by relating to each other.
The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations
…different neurotypes actively cooperate. They perceive different parts of the environment. They solve different kinds of problems. They build different features of the shared world. A group with multiple neurotypes doesn’t just survive more threats — it does things no single neurotype could do alone. That’s not insurance. That’s ecology.
The question isn’t “why does nature keep producing different kinds of minds?” The question is “what features of the world we all depend on exist because different kinds of minds built them together?”
Bet hedging explains why diversity persists. It doesn’t explain why it’s load-bearing.
For the first time, the age of digital networks enables us to construct cognitive assistants that help us to nurture and maintain globally distributed human scale competency networks – networks of mutual trust. It is time to tap into this potential and to combine it with the potential of zero-marginal cost global communication and collaboration.
The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations
Beyond eliminating formal hierarchical structures the NeurodiVenture model also removes all incentives for the emergence of informal “power-over” structures via transparency of all individual competency networks for the benefit of everyone within the company. This is perhaps the most radical idea within the NeurodiVenture model.
Transparency of individual competency networks enables meta knowledge (who has which knowledge and who entrusts whom with questions or needs in relation to specific domains of knowledge) to flow freely within an organisation.
The conceptualisation of meta knowledge flows via individual competency networks assists the coordination of activities via the advice process outlined above and via regular Open Space workshops, and it acts as an effective dampener on the informal hierarchies that can easily come to plague hierarchical and “non-hierarchical” organisations.
Organising for neurodivergent collaboration | Autistic Collaboration
On so many levels, interdependence requires being seen, as much as possible, as your true self. Meaning that your capacity and need are transparent.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
“We need all of the different kinds of thinkers. And the first step is realizing that they exist and they need to work together as teams.”
Temple Grandin
