Mood follows the action
By Gregory Ronczewski, Director of Product Design at Ibbaka. See his skill profile.
There are two sides to Ibbaka Talent - Skill Profile and Competency Modelling. The Skill Profile side allows individuals to take advantage of the platform's functionality and organize their skills into a meaningful skill portrait. The competency modeling area also uses skills as building blocks. However, other vital objects, like jobs or roles, allow the user to create a competency model.
If you want to learn more about how it works, there is an excellent post by Ibbaka's co-founder, Steven Forth, on Simple (very simple) skill and competency models.
Skills are the building blocks that we use on both sides. They are the central linking element when a skill profile is connected to the competency model. Our Knowledge Center has many illustrated articles on connecting Profiles to Competencies. In the recent version of our platform, a job or role is how the profile is linked to the model. If you look at a job or a role, the modeling environment enables the model editor to add layers to how a model is organized. I want to take a closer look at behaviours. Through many interviews and discussions, we learned that individual skills often escape our ability to name and organize. It becomes much simpler if we add skills in the context of behaviour. Behaviours are easier to describe.
Recently, I was listening to a podcast with neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman. Two hours well spent. Among a whole array of exciting details, at one point, he returns to this simple outline of how we function, or rather, what is the common understanding of how we operate. It starts with a sensation followed by perception. Next, we have feelings, thoughts, and lastly, we get to behaviours. Dr. Huberman points out that to control or change your autonomic nervous system—that's neuroplasticity—we need to run this path backwards. Start with the behaviour. If you change your behaviour, usually the feelings, thoughts, and perceptions will change as well. Mood follows the action. He further explains that behaviours are concrete, there is a solid base to firmly connect with, while feelings and thoughts, as well as perception, are hard to pin down. To shift how we function, we need to go straight forward to the behaviour to perform better. He says, "It's foolish to believe that we can do it by changing our thoughts first." When one starts with behaviour, there is a fundamental difference in our nervous system's underlying changes. The action that is the change is rewarded at the neurochemical level. And we feel good about ourselves. He further explains: if there is a challenging moment, we have three options - freeze, turn back, or charge forward to face the challenge. Only the path forward rewards us. It motivates us to take another step and another. If we wait and say, "well, I need to calm down and think about it," we miss the opportunity to change our behaviour.
I think it's a pretty significant insight. Today more than ever, we are challenged at many levels. Our working environment is different, our commute to work is different (or doesn't exist in my case), our lives are altered by what's going on. There are plenty of articles on how the pandemic will change almost everything. So, instead of thinking about the ways we can change, we should consider changing it.
There is so much about the environment and us that we don't understand. It helps to hear concepts that offer a different approach. Sometimes, the foundations on which we build our theories turn out to be false. Sometimes we get lucky. "Just do it" by Nike hit the sweet spot. It was coined in 1988! Years before neuro-marketing begin to pay closer attention to how our brain functions. I am reading a fascinating book by Dr. Gerald H. Pollack, The Fourth Phase of Water. In the Preface, he brings what legendary quantum physicist Richard Feynman wrote in an introduction to one of his books:
"It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see, my physics students don't understand it either. That's because I don't understand it. Nobody does."
How we work remotely? What does distancing mean to us? How to be more productive? How to be safe? How to change? I think the pandemic created an opportunity to look in the mirror. Focus. Explore avenues that lead toward the unknown, even if it is different or scary. And if it's scary, Dr. Huberman has a couple of approaches to calm you down instantly.
Returning to behaviours, the Ibbaka Talent platform allows adding individual skills to each behaviour and re-using these skills, adding depth to jobs, roles or tasks. A couple of essential skills, for me at least, will be Listening and Providing Feedback. We have several posts specifically concerning what we call Critical Skills. A job or a role in the competency model, with is a set of critical skills connected to behaviours spanning across multiple jobs and roles, will set individuals and organizations on the right track to looking differently at how work is done. With what we have learned from Dr. Huberman, on how we can change our behaviours, we can apply to face the future of work with confidence. A a skill profile on Ibbaka talent is the first step. So, don't think about it. Just do it.
