What is skill diversity? How does it impact performance?
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
Diversity and inclusion are an important theme in many organizations today. We are coming to understand that monocultures impede innovation and performance. Accepting, seeking, celebrating diversity is not just the right thing to do. It is critical to many aspects of performance.
What if workforce diversity is more than simply the right thing to do? What if it can also improve the bottom line? It can. The Diversity Bonus shows how and why. Scott Page, a leading thinker, writer, and speaker whose ideas and advice are sought after by corporations, nonprofits, universities, and governments, makes a clear and compelling practical case for diversity and inclusion. He presents overwhelming evidence that teams that include different kinds of thinkers outperform homogenous groups on complex tasks, producing what he calls “diversity bonuses.” These bonuses include improved problem solving, increased innovation, and more accurate predictions—all of which lead to better results.
From the introduction to
The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy
by Scott Page
The diversity that matters most to business performance is skill diversity. Individuals, teams and organizations all benefit from having a diverse skill base to draw from. Skill diversity prepares us for some of most pressing challenges that businesses face today.
How to build resilience
How to adapt to changing environments
How to drive innovation
How to give employees paths to the future of work
What do we mean by skill diversity?
There are many dimensions to skill diversity. The dimensions we have found most relevant are the domain (the different fields of knowledge), the skill categories (foundational, social, technical, design, business, tool), the actual skill types, levels of expertise, cognitive style and emotional style. In some cases, we consider communication style as well.
Skill diversity is relevant at the individual, team and organizational levels. If you are working at a larger scale, it is also relevant to communities, geographical or professional.
There are three things to consider.
Diversity across knowledge domains
Diversity across skill (KSA) types
Diversity in levels of expertise
There has been a lot of talk in the learning and performance world of the importance of a Pi shaped skill profile. A person with a Pi shaped profile combines breadth of skills with expertise in two different domains. Having expertise in more than one domain carries a lot of advantages. It is required for concept blending, one of the most effective innovation methods; it gives perspective on each of the domains; and it can contribute to mental flexibility. For a fun summary of the different ‘skill shapes’ (I, T, Pi, Comb, E) see this post by Milvio di Bartolomeo.
Domain is only one aspect of skill diversity. Ibbaka categorizes skills into seven categories (and tags them as Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes). See these three different skill profiles!
Glancing at these three profiles, one can also see diversity in levels of expertise. This is also important. A person with skills at different levels of diversity is likely to be open to learning new things. A person who only has skills at the Expert or Guru level is likely to be narrowing down their focus and not opening it up.
All three of these people are at the same organization, and as their skills are diverse we can guess that the organization also has a diverse skill set. Indeed, it does. Here is the high-level skill map for the whole company.
Beyond this, differences in emotional and cognitive style are also important aspects of skill diversity. These are important topics that Ibbaka is currently researching. For cognitive style, two useful approaches are Kirton’s Adaptation-Innovation Theory and Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences. Emotional style is a more sensitive discussion as it is also highly context dependent. Sensitivity to emotional context is something most of us need to work on.
What value does diversity provide?
Ibbaka looks at value through three lenses: Economic, Emotional and Community. (See What is value-based pricing by Jessie Tai.) Skill diversity contributes to each of these.
Economic Value
As outlined above, skill diversity contributes to resilience, adaptation and innovation. One could measure this by looking at the two most abstract economic value drivers: risk reduction and generation of options.
Skill diversity reduces risk by giving individuals, teams and organizations more than one way to respond to the environmental shocks. Scott Page’s work, cited above, shows some of the ways to quantify this.
If you learn by watching videos, you may enjoy this talk he gave on the topic at Berkeley.
The value of having different options is more difficult to quantify, but perhaps even more important. This is what underlies the value of skill diversity in underpinning adaptability and enabling innovation.
Emotional Value
Having a diverse set of skills is also important to many people’s self esteem (we are using Maslow’s language here). It gives a sense of confidence and agency. A skill profile, like those shown above, can reinforce this. Beyond this, skill diversity can be important for self actualization. This is not universally true, some people are more comfortable when they are deep specialists and we need to respec this. But what is true for the individual is not necessarily true for the team, the organization or the community.
Community Value
Communities with diverse and connected skills will be more adaptable and resilient. They will be better able to reconfigure under stress and then to adapt to take advantage of new opportunities. There has been a lot of chatter recently about transferable skills. These are skills that can be applied in many different ways to many different jobs. Transferable skills are one way to develop community resilience, but they are only part of the answer. For deep resilience communities need to be able to respond to external shocks, like a global pandemic, by rapidly changing how they work, provide services and create opportunities. This requires more than just transferable skills. People in the community need to be able to draw on their latent skills and connect with other people in new ways. Skill diversity underlies this.
How can we achieve skill diversity?
How can individuals, teams, organizations and even communities develop skill diversity?
There is no one answer to this question but perhaps the best starting point is that ‘diversity breeds diversity.’ I know that is circular, but what it implies is that one wants to build skill diversity before it is necessary.
Include the full range of your skills - not just your work skills
Most of us have far more diverse skills than we give ourselves credit for. In addition to our work skills we have skills from our roles in our families and communities and from our passions and hobbies. Recognizing our wider life experiences is the first step to developing skill diversity.
Find your potential skills
Beyond our explicit skills we have many latent and potential skills that we could develop with a little effort and a few more experiences.
A recent example is Artificial Intelligence. People with a good knowledge of statistics and probability (especially Bayesian probability) and who know how to code can rapidly add the development of deep learning solutions to their skillset. This is especially true now that we have good environments to support deep learning development like Keras and Tensorflow.
A good exercise is to look at your current skills and think about how you could combine them to create new skills. This is a good thing to do with another person. Other people often have insights into our skills that we are too close to see.
The Ibbaka Platform uses its AI to infer and suggest potential skills.
Connect with others
Many of us do most of our work on teams. One way to create skill diversity is to connect skills, and people, in new ways. This is how evolution works, by generating and selecting new combinations. Sometimes these connections are internal, a person starts combining two different skill sets in new ways. But just as often it comes from putting people with different skill sets together in new ways.
At Ibbaka we combine people with design thinking skills with others that have expertise in software engineering and business domains, like customer value management. We do this by building cross functional teams and then look at the emergent skills. The AI can also help us discover these potential skills that come by putting people together.
Search out opportunities to develop new skills
None of us know everything we want to know, or that we need to know. Even if that is true for a moment the world changes. So we all need to be seeking out the experiences that help us develop new skills. This could be some form of formal learning, or more likely a stream of informal learning and conversations, but work experiences are also a critical part of this. As organizations, and even communities, we should be creating as many learning experiences as possible. But the real responsibility for this falls on the individual’s shoulders. Each of us needs to be developing our own skills, helping people in our circle to develop their skills, and finding new ways to put those skills to use.
Implications for competency models and frameworks
Ibbaka does a lot of work with competency models and frameworks. The Competency Modeling Environment is one side of our platform and we are investing a lot in the development and sharing of open competency models (more on these in a moment). But we are aware that competency models can also stifle diversity. There is an old joke about implementing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems …
Implementing an ERP is like taking your business processes and pouring concrete over them.
Unfortunately, the same can be of a competency model or framework. Experts think we know the skills required for a role or task and how to define them. It would be more accurate to say that we know how to define some of the skills that we know for how we perform today. A rigid and overly specific competency model can be like pouring concrete over your current capabilities.
A concrete example, Design Thinking is an important capability. We at Ibbaka are committed to it and have made it our first Open Competency Model. There are many different ways to be an expert in design thinking and many different skills that can come into play. A competency model for design thinking needs to be open and diverse in order to reflect this.
Ibbaka Open Competency Models are open in three ways.
They are made available under a Creative Commons License
They can be recombined with other competency models
They evolve over time with usage
When designing a competency model, ask
Will this model encourage or discourage skill diversity?
How will this model support diversity and inclusion?
Has the ability to change and evolve been designed in?
One of my favourite books is Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn: What Happens to Them After They[re Built.
There are a many lessons from this book that can be applied to competency models and skill diversity.
Brand introduces a 6S model in which different parts of the building evolve at different speeds. The six Ss are Stuff, Space Plan, Services, Skin, Structure, Site.
We can apply the same thinking to skill and competency models. Here the levels will depend on the model, but one possible architecture is
Skills
Tasks
Behaviours
Roles
Jobs
These five levels of the model, and the model architecture itself, can evolve at different speeds and in response to different forces. Diversity is what enables change. The underlying skills and potential skills are going to be more diverse than can be captured in any model. The model needs to be able to leverage that diversity.
Ibbaka Posts on critical skills
Critical Skills for the Future of Work - Managing Trade Offs
Three dimensions of skill diversity (this post)