Critical skills for the future of work - Managing trade offs
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
As I get older the trade offs I have to make at work and in my personal life become harder to ignore. They also become harder to resolve. I the time left to me, where should I focus my personal energy and investments? What should I be learning? How do I share what I have learned?
The same is true for Ibbaka. The company has to make trade offs in where it invests, what markets it targets and who it creates value for.
Understanding trade offs and the connections between different goals is a critical skill in a dynamic and rapidly changing environment.
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I was reminded of this in a book I am reading. Software Engineering at Google: Lessons from Programming Over Time curated by Titus Winters, Tom Mashrek and Hyrum Wright. In the chapter on Leading at Scale there is an interesting mini case study on Web Search Optimization, something Google knows more than a little about. Google used to struggle with this, it would invest in improving search quality and over time search quality would get better but latency would build up. Eventually they would call a ‘code yellow’ and knock latency back down, but it would always build back up. (At Google ‘Code Yellow’ is an emergency Hackathon to fix a critical problem. Affected teams are supposed to suspend all other work and swarm the problem until the state of emergency is declared over.) The third factor was the capacity of the servers. One could reduce latency by increasing the capacity of the servers or by delivering lower quality search results.
Once one understands the tradeoffs one can manage them. Rather than having the occasional code yellow Google now actively manages Latency, Search Quality and Capacity and is consciously growing the skills it needs to do this.
The trade off triangle for search optimization probably reminded many people of the well known trade offs in project management. “Speed, Quality, Cost, pick two.” Project managers have this drilled into them early in their careers and over time the best project managers become expert at both communicating and managing these trade offs.
An important thing to understand about trade off triangles is that none of these can be zero. A search query that returned no search results (quality = zero) would have low latency and capacity but would have no value. In project management, there is always a threshold for quality that must be met to have value; the project must be delivered in a finite period of time; and there is always an upward limit in the budget.
One trade off triangle that has come into focus during the Covid-19 pandemic is that of Efficiency-Resilience-Adaptation. We have written about this in Managing the tension between adaptation resilience and efficiency - how skill models evolve .
This is the trade off triangle underlying organizational design. One has to find the right balance between the ability of an organization to adapt, the resilience with which it can withstand shocks, and its ability to deliver value efficiently. The relative importance of each of these will change according to strategy and the operating environment.
Trade off triangles also show up in our personal life. This is sometimes framed as work-life balance but in fact it is seldom as simple as balancing work and personal life. For many of us there are trade offs to be managed between work, family and our individual aspirations.
One trade off that we often encounter at Ibbaka concerns design. We design many things at Ibbaka, software architectures, user interfaces, management frameworks, pricing models and of course skill and competency models. In design there is often a trade off triangle between Simplicity, Depth and Breadth.
Frequently this is not an easy discussion. There is a premium placed on simplicity in a world that is already experienced as too complex by many of us. At the same time, knowledge has exploded over the past 100 years so that it is more an more difficult for generalists to make a real contribution. On the other hand, many poor decisions are the result of experts relying on their own expertise and not understanding the wider context in which the decision will be implemented. The wider context and the system level impacts matter. There are no canned answers here. The balance between simplicity, depth and breadth will change depending on context and goals.
So managing trade offs seems like a good candidate as a critical skill for the future of work. Where would we situate it in the skill graph?
The key supporting skills are Domain Knowledge, Abstraction, Goal Setting and Balancing. One cannot really understand, let alone manage, trade offs without understanding the Domain(s) or contexts involved. Of course in actual work Domain will be replaced by the specific areas involved. It takes Abstraction to be able to understand what the trade offs are, Goal Setting to know how to evaluate the trade offs and a sense of Balance as none of the vertices can be set to zero.
Actually managing the trade offs will generally require negotiation with other concerned parties. One seldom has the luxury of deciding on the trade offs on one’s own. Managing trade offs also requires some ability to forecast the future and evaluate different scenarios. Planning is also critical as managing trade offs generally involves decisions on how to invest resources and time.
Managing trade offs is a critical skill because it can be applied in to many different ways. Some of the most common are project management and product management, bit there are also many applications to areas like investment or even life planning. The little snippet of the skill graph shown above is just part of a much large, linked, structure.
Trade off conversations are powerful. As Google discovered, understanding the trade offs makes it much easier to manage them. What trade offs are you currently managing: in your job, for a product, in a budget … ?
Have you discovered other trade off triangles in your work or life? Please share these in the comments below or by sending us an email at info@ibbaka.com.
Share your ideas on the critical skills for the future of work. Three minute survey.
What are the critical skills for the future of work?
We have an ongoing research program into critical skills. You can follow that work here.
Below are a list of skills we have explored in depth to date.
Connections - Foundational
Conversation - Social
Critical Thinking - Foundational
Empathy - Social
Learning - Foundational
Managing trade offs - foundational
Play - Foundational
Problem Solving - Foundational
Reflection - Foundational
Sketching - Foundational
Trust - Social
For some context on our work on critical skills see What are the critical skills for the future of work?
Note that Ibbaka’s default skill categories are as follows:
Foundational - the skills used to build other skills
Social - the skills used to work with other people
Business (Organizational) - skills used to conduct business and operate an organization
Technical - the classic STEM skills (Science, Technology, Engineering and (Applied) Math)
Design - skills used in developing new design and solutions
Tool - the actual tools used to carry out Business, Technical and Design work
Domain - broad areas of knowledge and culture
Where do I learn more about critical skills?
Here are some critical skills we are exploring:
Abstraction - Foundational
Adaptation - Foundational
Choice Making - Foundational
Coaching - Social
Community Curation - Social
Inference - Foundational
Observational Learning - Foundational
Resilience - Foundational
Sense Making - Foundational
Writing - Foundational
Want us to cover a skill that is not on the list? Join us for a conversation about the critical skills we will all need to adapt to the future of work.