For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned
By Gregory Ronczewski, Director of Product Design at Ibbaka. See his skill profile.
I am still reading The Information, a History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick. There is a fascinating section about ordering, classifying and organizing. Something that we take for granted. For instance, the alphabetical order does not pose any questions for anyone. It is a simple way to manage a large number of things. Books, for example. But it wasn't that simple when it was introduced. To begin with, alphabetical ordering is only possible for languages using an alphabet. In the ancient world, alphabetical lists appeared around 250 BCE in Alexandria, with its magnificent library. So there is nothing strange about alphabetical ordering if one knows how to use it. However, looking closely at this system, it appears unnatural. It forces the seeker to detach information from meaning. To treat words as character strings stripped them of their meaning. Gleick writes, "alphabetical ordering comprises a pair of procedures, one the inverse of the other: organizing a list and looking up items; sorting and searching. In either direction, the procedure is recursive." Nevertheless, it is a great system. Imagine how much empowerment knowing the alphabet brought to the educated. A person who understands the system can easily comb through millions of entries with absolute confidence. The first alphabetical catalogue appeared in 1613, however, it was not printed but written into two small handbooks.
There is another way of classifying items. That is by their meaning. Erya, the oldest Chinese dictionary from around 200 BCE, contained two thousand entries organized by meaning into topical categories such as kinship, building, tools and weapons, the heavens, the earth, plants and animals. Topical lists are thought-provoking, creative, and often imperfect. On the other hand, alphabetical lists are mechanical, effective and automatic. Words are treated as tokens, with their meaning being secondary in importance. And then, we have dictionaries, which, apart from being alphabetically organized, treat words differently - the meaning of words comes from other words. Therefore, they must be considered words representing other words apart from their functional alphabetical organization.
“Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”
We often take dictionaries for granted, another book on the shelf or a web page to consult. Yet, the amount of work that went into creating one is mind blowing. For instance, A New English Dictionary presented to King George V in 1928 contained 414,825 words. The second edition came out sixty-one years later, in 1989, in a massive twenty volumes containing 22,000 pages, but starting in 2000, everything was moved online.
So let's go online and look up some key terms, starting with Classification. Here is the definition from google:
The action or process of classifying something according to shared qualities or characteristics. Here is an example from google as well, "The classification of disease according to symptoms."
Biology. The arrangement of animals and plants in taxonomic groups according to their observed similarities (including kingdom and phylum in animals, division in plants, class, order, family, genus, and species).
A category into which something is put.
Then, we also have Categorization. Below is what Google has to say about this:
the action or process of placing into classes or groups. For instance, "categorization by topic."
a system of classes into which something is sorted. An example is "categorizations in music."
Organizing skills
How would one organize skills? Alphabetical order is one approach. As we saw above, the names of each skill will be treated merely as tokens, a representation granting each one a well-deserved spot on the mechanical list. This is very functional when one knows what to look for. On Ibbaka Talio, the library of skills can be viewed in alphabetical order.
But behind a skill name hides something emotional, often abstract, and very social. Skills are social in nature, they like to be grouped, and they work best when several engage together. It is precisely why we organize skills into categories, which are topical lists. Our lists are not perfect for every use, so we allow companies to create their own lists. But for sure, browsing through our standard categories introduces the user into thought-provoking structures, that show when a skill supports another skill in an organic dance, helping to visualize how a group of skills present in a team or organization could elevate or alter the direction of any project.
Without an inventory, it is hard to evaluate anything we own. The Ibbaka Talio platform welcomes users with a set of supporting questions resulting in a sketch of a skill map that can be quickly elevated through skill suggestions and connections to a meaningful representation. Next, through the team or project relationship, peer reviews paint an accurate picture of the state of skills in the individual, team or company profiles. And the best part - it is dynamic, ever-changing, and evolving. It is not measured in massive volumes but in the satisfaction and value provided for the platform users. Don't delay - Request a Demo of Ibbaka Talio now.
