Sketching is a pretty valuable skill. It is one of the best ways to capture ideas, explore connections and communicate our thoughts and feelings. It is a core design skill. Maybe it should be seen as a core business skill too!

Putting together our passion for understanding skills and our interest in exploring new ways to present them we have been asking people to sketch their skills. We provide a few tools – a sheet of cardboard to sketch on, pens, pencils and even crayons, and a quiet place to sit out of the office bustle.

Please take our little survey on What Skills Are Relevant in 2016?

The instructions are simple. “Please sketch your skills, you can interpret that any way you like. The sketch should tell another person something about you.”

We have collected about 20 of these sketches so far, and hope to get well over 100 over the course of the year.

Why are we doing this? Mostly because it is fun, for us and for the people doing the sketches. We are frequently astonished and moved. We learn things about ourselves by studying other people’s sketches. This is also part of our long-term effort to get a deep understanding of how people think about their skills, organize them inside their heads and present them to other people.

Once we have more than 100 sketches we plan to do some analysis. We are geeks too. We will run them through pattern recognition software and look for patterns. We will map the semantic relationships and category structures. We will show them to people to get quick impressions. We will use any insights we get to inform our own design.

We are already seeing some clear patterns. Some people take ‘sketch’ literally (see the two examples above). These are some of the most enchanting examples, you have to spend some time thinking and interpreting the sketches, but as a result, you actually get to know the person a bit better.

There are also mind-mapping approaches. These are generally from older people who have already thought a lot about their skills and how they are connected. The above example has a sort of left-brain-right-brain approach.

Other people take a more structured approach. The above sketch, by a young engineer with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, was described to us as a reinterpretation of his C.V.

We have been seeing two other patterns as well: skill clustering in which skills are organized into ‘clouds’ of associated skills with connector skills between them (we have seen this in other research as well) and skill maps, where skills are connected with lines drawn between them (sometimes the lines are labeled, but generally not).

And of course there are lots of hybrid examples. Like this one, which combines elements of sketching, mind mapping and clustering.

If you would like to participate in this research please contact us and we will find a way to get you skill sketching!

All of this work is just one of many ways we are exploring how a deep understanding of skills will help people to realize their full potential and organizations to build the capabilities they need to deliver on their strategy.

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