Core Concepts: Skill
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
Definition: What is a skill?
1a: the ability to use one's knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance
b: dexterity or coordination especially in the execution of learned physical tasks
2: a learned power of doing something competently : a developed aptitude or ability
Definition 1a the one that we are most concerned with, “the ability to use one's knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance.”
Application of knowledge is the foundation of many skills. It is not enough to know something, one must also be able to apply that knowledge effectively to get a result.
Recognizing context. Application requires recognizing the context in which the knowledge is relevant and being able to connect the knowledge to other skills needed for application. These other skills on which successful application depends are ‘associated skills,’ see Complementary, Associated and Connecting skills.
This is just a start though. Skills can involve more than just knowledge, at least as knowledge is conventionally defined.
Muscle memory is an important part of many skills. This is true of more than just physical skills, experienced programmers rely on muscle memory to use different commands and data structures fluently so that they can focus on higher level programming tasks.
Unconscious connections between different sets of knowledge and behaviours also play an important role. A translator needs to know more than just the two languages, they also need to be able to make connections across the two languages. For experienced translators this happens below the level of consciousness. This is true of most skilled works and is the foundation of flow. See Flow as a critical skill.
At Ibbaka we focus on skills rather than competencies because skills are more granular. We are interested in helping people, teams and organizations uncover potential and put it to work, so need to focus on the most granular and transferable level. This is skills, not competencies.
To make skills more manageable, we support the organization of skills into categories. We are preparing a post on this, but here are the default categories that ibbaka has found most useful:
Foundational skills: the skills used to build other skills
Social skills: the skills used to work with other people
Business skills: the skills used to manage an organization and conduct business
Technical skills: techniques and best practices, most often associated with engineering and computer engineering, but more generally applied to the skills associated with any technical discipline
Design skills: the creative skills used to come up with new solutions and concept and their representation
Tools: the physical tools, software tools and other algorithms and heuristics used to implement business, technical and design skills (graphic design is a design skill; Adobe Photoshop is a tool)
Domain knowledge: knowledge of domains of human knowledge, from knowledge of a specific organization, to a culture, to broad disciplines
Languages: human languages, this post is written in the language English
We often speak in terms of KSAs (Knowledge Skills and Attributes see the Core Concept on this) but of these three concepts it is skills we focused on skills. It is the application of skills that has the biggest impact on performance.
Core Concepts: Skill Management and Competency Modelling
Skill (this post)
Competency Framework and Competency Model
Coming soon …
Skill Assessment
Core Concepts: Pricing and Customer Value Management
Coming soon …
Value Metric
Value Driver
Economic Value Driver
Emotional Value Driver
Community Value Driver
Value Model
Pricing Model
Connecting Value and Pricing Models
Pricing Design
Package Design
Price Elasticity of Demand
Cross Price Elasticity
Interactions of Cross Price Elasticity and Price Elasticity of Demand
Value Based Market Segmentation
Value Path
Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV)
Value to Customer (V2C)
Value Ratio
Economic Value Estimation (EVE)
Willingness to Pay (WTP)
Pocket Price Waterfall
Customer Value Journey
Customer Value Management