Critical skills for the future of work - making connections
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
One way to understand the evolution of the economy over the coming months is in terms of resilience, adaptation and efficiency.
There is a well known pattern where systems move from resilience to efficiency to adaptation. One needs some level of resilience in order to buy the time required to adapt. Those systems that had enough latent resilience to survive the initial shock of the pandemic are now moving beyond resilience to adaptation. For the next few years, many of us will be concerned with the critical skills needed for adaptation. One of these is making connections.
In his book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success, network scientist Albert-László Barabási shows how network science can explain many aspects of performance. Network science is the application of the mathematical discipline of graph theory to practical problems. Arguably, graph theory is as important to the digital age as calculus was to the age of the machine.
Networks depend on the ability to make connections. It is the connections that define the network. But what kind of connections?
We often separate this into two different skills: social networking and connecting ideas. In today’s world the best networkers combine both.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is often help up as an example of a great social networker. He had the phone number of almost everyone is a position of political or economic power around the world. He worked hard to promote conversations between these people. And he helped many people with their careers. He was a consummate social networker. But he was only such a successful networker because he was also concerned with ideas, and many of the people he connected he did so because they could share ideas, or in some cases, refute each others point of view. Famed as a practitioner of realpolitik, he was primarily a person of ideas.
Another person who combined the ability to connect ideas with a passion for meeting and connection people was the mathematician Paul Erdős. Erdős played an important roles in the development of graph theory and the network science it informs, but he is equally famous for the wide number of people he worked with. So famous, in fact, that many people in the sciences know there Erdős number. If you co-authored a paper with Erdős then your Erdős number is one, if you wrote a paper with one of his co-authors then your Erdős number is two and so on. Last time I checked, my own Erdős number was six. If you are interested in finding your own Erdős number , Oakland University has a site to help you.
There is, not surprisingly, a graph of the Erdős network and if you explore this you will find that the graph is both a social graph and an idea graph. See Gene Dan’s blog to explore this further.
Social networking is the ability to reach out to many different people, introduce people who share mutual interests, and to connect them.
Mutual interests need not mean that they share the same beliefs or values. People who disagree with each other often form strong connections and help each other take their ideas to the next level. As they say, opposites attract. At Ibbaka we try to embody this by applying the approach of ‘strong ideas, loosely held.’
Networking ideas and concepts is perhaps less recognized as a skill than social networking, but it is critical to successfully navigating today’s networked world.
One approach to this is concept blending, which Mark Turner and his associates have shown to be central to thought. Concept blending takes concepts from two different areas and finds way to connect them to find new solutions. (For an example see how Ibbaka has combined scenario planning with portfolio management to develop a more adaptive way to approach pricing management).
The ability to combine social and concept networking relies on some important supporting skills.
One of them is simple to say, difficult to do. Openness. One has to be open to new people, new ideas, that represent beliefs, assumptions and values different from one’s own. Cultivating this skill should be a priority for all of and the organizations we are responsible to. Learning to do this requires, I believe, both empathy and humility, a willingness to learn from anyone, anywhere.
Another supporting skill is Lateral Thinking. The goal of lateral thinking is to move from a deeply embedded chain of thought to another stream and then to find the connections between them.
If you are trying to solve a problem in how to design a learning resource one can often get hints from disciplines that seem remote, like evolutionary theory. It is common to talk these days about memes, and how to help people to learn by embedding new memes. The idea of memes was introduced by evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Edward De Bono has developed many tools and techniques for lateral thinking.
Critical skills often have mediating skills that help with their application in specific domains. A common example of this these days is Design Thinking. Design Thinking generally refers to a process popularized by IDEO and the d.school at Stanford University. Design thinking is being applied to many different problems these days (Ibbaka manages the large and rather unwieldy Design Thinking group on LinkedIn).
The supporting skill that may surprise you above is Gift Giving. It is a critical social skill though, and an enabler of networking.
The best way to enter a network is to give gifts. The simplest gift is that of attention. In today’s information saturated world one of the most valuable gifts we can give is attention and consideration for another’s feelings and ideas. On social network software, LinkedIn groups is an example, the most respected people are those that take the time to comment on other people’s posts, and not the people who post the most discussions.
Ibbaka will continue to investigate critical skills and the role they play in learning and performance. If you have a suggestion on this, please contact us through info@ibbaka.com.
Ibbaka posts on critical skills
Critical Skills for 2022 - First Impressions of Survey Results
Critical Skills - Generative Thinking (Interview with GK VanPatter)
Critical Skills for the Future of Work - Making Connections (this post)
Critical Skills for the Future of Work - Managing Trade Offs
Critical Skills for the Future of Work - What are the Critical Skills?
Join us for a conversation about the critical skills we will all need to adapt to the future of work.
