"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible." ~ Alfred Hitchcock
Gregory Ronczewski leads the design of the TeamFit - view his skill profile
When Emotional Branding by Marc Gobé went on sale in 2001, it was described by Design Management Journal as “worth more than a whole shelf of business books.” The core concept of how our emotions are guiding us was (and still is) hard to accept. Seventeen years later, references to our emotional side appear in many best selling publications.
One of the authors who spent years looking very closely at how people spend their days is Martin Lindstrom. In Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends he writes about Sir Alfred Hitchcock and the two scripts that he kept while working on a movie. The blue script was pretty much similar to what other directors use, perhaps more detailed as Hitchcock was obsessed with precision and wanted to control everything. The other script, which Lindstrom calls green, followed its blue brother but in it, Hitchcock tried to get into the head of his audience and predict or note what emotions the movie should trigger. When I read this, I immediately saw Customer Journeys that Service Design uses to understand the brand effects with its happy-sad diagrams capturing the emotions of people using the product or service. No doubt, Hitchcock was a master storyteller. His name alone brings many emotions to mind. He once said: "Drama is life with the dull bits cut out." Focus on the key ingredients and leave all other stuff out.
Apart from the importance of emotions in general, we can find many research papers describing our inner voice, a personality that is directly linked to our feelings, our Twin-self. Think about it - do you sometimes talk to yourself? Not necessary aloud, but just in your head. Who is this person? How old is she or he? How do you see yourself? You may wonder why I am writing about this. It is pretty significant. TeamFit allows you to build a profile, and very often, when we construct those profiles, we are guided by our second selves. Simply put, in the digital world, we can show only what we want to the public to see, and hide those areas where we are not confident.
TeamFit is a Skill Management Platform, we want to show an accurate skill portrait of the user, but at the same time, we need to make sure we allow the user to build their Skill Map carefully. That is why we offer many ways to customize it. We have Core Skills, Target Skills, and we allow users to Hide Skills as well. They remain invisible to the public, but their impact on our algorithm is active. Afterall, those maps will help people to secure the new job opportunities. It gets even more complicated when you put yourself in the allocator or manager's shoes. Nobody wants to see biased profiles listing only skills that are trending and have to interpret distorted profiles. We added the assessment level so that teams working together can indicate the level of expertise of their team members. This has proven to be pretty accurate. We also help the individual user by suggesting skills, by providing the ability to look at "similar people" or "people with complementary skills." We can provide access to mentors and experts in fields that are getting attention. And lastly, as I have said before, skills are abstract. You can't see skills. It's like being surrounded by an invisible network - we know it's there, we know we have the skills, but it takes quite a bit of imagination to visualize it. The Skill Map will surprise you. I'll bet you don't know how many skills you have and how they relate to each other.
I was reading the other day that when you are working on something, "the masterpiece" is just millimetres away. Tiger Woods said that almost invisible change in the spot where his club hits the ball translates into a sand trap or an eagle. We are often so close to solving a problem we are working on, yet we can't find the solution. We can almost touch it. This is precisely what Skill Map helps you with. We all have desires, plans, things we always wanted to learn but we managed to convince ourselves that now is not a good time, or that it's too late. How many dreams have you buried in your drawer? What if it's not too late. Your skills may show you that a job role or project you always wanted to work on is just within your reach... seeing is believing.
According to Fast Company (Frog Executive Creative Director Andreas Markdalen On His Go-To Tool For A World Gone Visual: Stock Photography), Instagram has now more than 800 million users and "in just ten years up to 84% of internet traffic in the United States is expected to be visual." People respond well to visual patterns and metaphors. We look for beauty, meaning, and narratives that excite us. We do live in a Visual Age. The chance to see your Skill Map is one of those tales that are worth exploring.
