Professional amateurs
Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean skating to Ravel's Bolero at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. In 2014, Torvill and Dean returned to Sarajevo to dance the Boléro one more time, celebrating the 30th anniversary of their Olympics performance.
By Gregory Ronczewski, Director of Product Design at Ibbaka. See his skill profile.
The other day, I was watching Abstract, the art of Design on Netflix. What caught my attention was the sense of "other" interests that was visible for each designer. It wasn't front and center, but clearly, a guitar in the back of the shop or the way someone spoke about food and cooking. We all have a set of skills that we use every day. On Ibbaka Talent, we call them the core skills. We also have plenty of skills that are not directly connected to our day jobs. Edge skills.
In a wonderful book titled Originals, Adam Grant points to research comparing Nobel Prize-winning scientists from 1901 to 2005 looking at the engagement in the arts among the winners and non-winners. It turns out that playing an instrument will increase chances to win Nobel two times. Performing arts, acting, or dance will increase it twenty-two times! That's a lot.
What about other non-work-related activities? We can call it a hobby, but really, I am not sure if this is the right name. For many, the level of professionalism displayed is really astonishing. They are what Ken Robinson, in his book The Element, calls "professional amateurs." They are very good at playing music, cooking, writing and so on. But for some reason, they decided not to pursue this talent and make it their profession. Instead, they keep a day job, which often has nothing to do with what they do after hours. Remember, once the Olympic Games allowed only amateur athletes. It was so much fun to watch Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean skating to Maurice Ravel's Boléro at the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo. They won gold. She was an insurance clerk, and he was a policeman. Professional amateurs.
I firmly believe that every skill we add to our array of either core skills or even just skills in general support each other, making each of our skill profiles unique. Recently, we have been seeing users add skills that are not directly related to their jobs. This is exactly what this post is about. We encourage people to add as many skills as they find relevant to the lives, including the edge skills that are often far from what one may expect—music, arts, crafts, cooking, coaching, equestrian, writing … we are all wonderfully diverse. That diversity is important to how we work.
What makes people engage in arts or become an amateur athlete at a professional level? Curiosity and creativity? A hunch that perhaps there is more for us to do. Curiosity and creativity, if applied in a specific domain, may lead to innovation. There is another interesting point made in Originals by Adam Grant. A study led by the economist Michael Housman aimed at figuring out why some customer service agents stayed longer in their jobs than others. After looking at a massive amount of data, Housman was not able to point to any specific factor. Until he decided to test if there was a correlation between what browser agents used when they applied for the job. He found that Chrome and Firefox users will remain in their jobs 15 percent longer than Internet Explorer or Safari users. The same pattern was visible when it came to missing work or job performance. The users who run Internet Explorer (PC) or Safari (Mac) are the people who "take the world as it is." They will not go off script, try new approaches, or invent a novel marketing idea. On the other hand, Chrome or Firefox users decided not to use the default browser. They wanted something different, perhaps better? The difference was in how they obtained the browser. Almost two-thirds of the customer service agents used the default configuration "never questioning the status quo." Others decided to look for another option, downloading and installing a new browser, not accepting the default - they showed initiative. It turned out that insignificant detail—what browser is use—pointed towards powerful insight.
Ibbaka Talent makes it easy to build and organize a skill profile. A profile that captures the user's core and target skills in the context of a role or job. Adding edge skills gives another dimension to an individual. Skills related to playing music together, or coaching a sport, or writing for that matter, add dimensions that can be relevant to work. When we operate solemnly in our domain, we quickly become prisoners of rules and default solutions. Venturing outside—and that is what a hobby is, for lack of a better word—gives us a new perspective. We are more open to ideas, to collaboration, to innovation.
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