**Steven Forth** is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.

Critical Skills for 2022

Skill differentiation highlights the differences between individuals, teams, companies and even geographies or industries based on the distribution of skills.

It is one of our themes at Ibbaka. In a recent post, David Botta talked about how we use key skills to help us uncover differentiation. In this post we take a step back and ask …

Why care about skill differentiation?

A lot of work in skill management and with skill and competency models is about setting a baseline and making sure that the skills needed to deliver on goals are available. This is a natural, top down approach to skill management. Identifying skill coverage, finding skill gaps, providing ways to close gaps and deepen bench strength are key value propositions.

But is this enough?

Our work in value management has taught us that differentiation is critical to performance. The common denominator becomes a commodity. The differentiated is where value is created and competitive advantage established. See Who are you creating value for?

In other words, it is not just the common skills that are shared by individuals or organizations that matter. It is the skills that are unique that give real insights into potential and provide strategic leverage.

Unique skills signal potential

There are skills that we all need to work effectively. These are the skills that everyone is expected to have at some level of proficiency. Many of these common skills rapidly become commodities and are eventually ignored as they are seen as a given.

Once upon a time, being able to use a word processor was a new and important skill. Today, my eight year old granddaughter knows how to use a word processor to do all sorts of things. Most common skills eventually become commodities and at some point they are assumed. They don’t need to be in a skill profile or competency model. When they do show up, it raises questions about why a person has called out that skill. All skill profiles, even those with 100s of skills, are a small subset of all the skills a person has.

Unique skills are the skills the skills that differentiate us from each other. We all share a wide set of basic skills, but there are certain pieces of knowledge, skills that we have and attitudes we bring to work make us special. Ibbaka is built around identifying what makes each of us unique and using this to uncover potential and connect it to work.

Why do unique skills signal potential?

It may seem counterintuitive to say that it is the unique skills that best signal potential. Why not the most common skills? Common skills are important. They provide a foundation. But they are also what other people bring to the table. When everyone has the same set of skills none of the skills seem important.

Unique skills, or long-tail skills are signals of developing potential (see Look for your long tail skills - the screenshots are from an earlier version of the Ibbaka platform but the points here are still valid). The level of expertise on these skills and how often they have been applied in roles and projects is not as important as the fact that they are surfacing. New skills, old skills that are being reactivated and new combinations of skills (see below) are where we find the first signs of new potential emerging. This is true for individuals, but also for teams, organizations and even wider communities.

Unique skills define strategic opportunity

One of the things we do at Ibbaka is compare the skills of different organizations to see the strategic differentiation. We use this technique quite often in our value strategy work and it is also important as organizations begin to shape their own skill and competency models.

Comparing project skills at three design agencies

An early example of this is this comparison of the skills at the design agencies Frog, IDEO and Fjord. We did this several years ago, and I assume that the skills at all three of these companies has evolved since then, but the insights are value. Skill and specifically skill differentiation are strong signals of strategic direction.

Here are some of the conclusions from our comparison of these three, outwardly similar, agencies.

Frog
The list of unique design skills for each company is rather thin. For Frog we find User-Centred Design (but we know from other recent work that this is synonymous for Design Thinking in many people's minds), Design Strategy (that is interesting), Hypertext (a word I have not used for a while but is actually the foundation of a lot of current design work) and Visual Communication. Frog does have some unique technical skills around software development (Agile Software Development and Software Design-Engineering-Project Management Frameworks). This suggests it may have more software development muscle than the other firms.
IDEO
At IDEO, the unique design skills includes Rooms, Ergonomics and Product Design. The unique foundational skills are Design Thinking, Formal Sciences, Decision Theory and Game Theory. To me that suggests something about the approach IDEO will take to projects–that it will be a formally sound approach informed by relevant theory.
Fjord
Fjord is new to our data set. Here the unique design skills are 3D Imaging, Charts, Diagrams, Infographics, Interface Design and Metadesign. Metadesign–I had to dig in and see what other skills are associated with Metadesign (the TeamFit Skill Graph, our data structure, allows one to explore questions like this). The skills associated with Metadesign are mostly around education but also include Inquiry and Architecture. Inquiry also shows up as one of Fjord's unique foundational skills, along with Time Management, Ideation and Logic. Fjord has been part of professional services giant Accenture since 2013. It was acquired to add skills in creating digital experiences for consumers. Explore Fjord's skills using the comparison tool above. Does it have the right skills for this mission?

We have applied this to a number of industries, from finance to certain categories of SaaS software. Skill differentiation both constrains and predicts strategic choices.

Unique skill combinations are as important as unique skills

Sometimes we focus on a unique skill or skill set, but unusual combinations of common skills can be even more compelling sources of differentiation.

We are seeing this in some work we are doing to support the xR community. This is the companies and people developing Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR). To make these emergent categories real a wide range of skill sets in needed. Some of these are the expected technical and business skills, But we are also hearing about people bringing in skills from the theatre, and not just acting, but set design and stage management.

Companies do this as well. Being able to bring together skills from two or three conventional independent disciplines or domains can drive differentiation and open up new strategic opportunities. Right now, we are seeing this in the move by engineering firms, urban planning firms, and even architects to take advantage of the need to respond climate change. This will create a lot of ‘strange bedfellows.’ Social license consultants working with surface water flow analysts working with urban planners. Of course it is not enough to simply have these people in the same organization. They need to be able to work together in teams, which means they will need connecting skills. This raises the question, are connecting skills themselves a source of differentiation.

Connecting Skills: Shared skills that allow people from different disciplines work together effectively.

Ibbaka can work with you to help you understand your skill differentiation, how to sharpen this, and use this to support your strategy.

Interested in leveraging the power of skills and competencies? Let's Talk.

Ibbaka posts on competency models and competency frameworks

What is skill differentiation?