I don’t always know when I need help. I think that is true of most of us. We work hard on our projects. We are down in the weeds, moving forward towards our deadlines, deliverables and goals. Sometimes we don’t even realize when we are stuck.

It can be hard to know when you are stuck because your frame of reference is internal. It seems you are making progress because you are not looking at what is happening outside your project and how the world is passing you by.

I see this a lot at consulting companies. Which is a surprise. You would think that consulting companies, whose job it is to bring in outside perspectives, would be good at getting outside themselves. But it is often a case of ‘the cobbler’s children have no shoes.’ Consulting companies are so busy solving their client’s problems that they don’t address their own challenges.

This is what happened to Monitor group, which got into serious financial trouble and then sold itself to Deloitte in 2012. Monitor had a lot of very smart people who had done great work for many companies (disclosure: I worked at Monitor from 2006 to 2009). But it was not able to find an independent path forward for itself.

To continue to succeed we need to step outside of our projects and look at what we do with fresh eyes. That is not easy to do. And when we do this many of us turn to people who look a lot like us, people with the same background, from our own industry, with similar skillsets. That is not going to help.

The reason we get in a rut is not because we need to do what we are doing better. When the wheels are spinning revving a car just gets it into a deeper rut. People with the same skills as we have can often help us get better at what we are already good at. But that does not help us see what we are missing. To do that we need to find people who can come at our challenges from a different point of view.

One way to do that is to look for people with different skill sets and to ask them for advice. Of course there has to some point of connection here. We are exploring two related ways to do this at TeamFit.

• Make sure there are some connecting skills

• Look for people with the same high-level skill but very different component skills

(Interested in design trends? Check out Universal Design.)

Connecting Skills

We now have enough data in TeamFit to look for skill clusters. These are sets of skills that tend to be used together. We can look for skill clusters at the individual, project and organizational level. Once we identify skill clusters we can then look for skills that show up in two or more clusters. These are the connecting skills. (We plan to expose this new functionality early next year.)

When looking for a person who can bring a fresh perspective to a project we search for a person who shares a connector skill with the project (or a person or an organization) but has many other skills in her skill cluster that are not being used on the project. This person is likely to bring in a fresh perspective.

General Skills & Component Skills

Another approach is to look at the component skills associated with a general or high-level skill claim. Looking at the data in TeamFit we see a whole range of skill claims, from the very general like ‘critical thinking’ or ‘sales’ to the very specific like ‘configuring lead qualification in Hubspot’ or ‘negotiating service level agreements for CRM applications.’ When we probe on this we find that people can support a high-level skill claim with very different component skills. Finding two people with the same top-level skill but supported by very different component skills is another way to find people who may bring different perspectives to a problem.

Projects are often caught in a rut without realizing it. And the evidence for this turns up too late, once the project has come off the rails, is late and over budget with a stressed out team and frustrated clients. We can get out of the rut by inviting people from outside to look in and give us advice. But we can’t rely on just anyone’s advice. We need people that share a connecting skill with the project or who bring a different perspective to some of the core skills being applied. Our goal is to build TeamFit into a platform that will help you to do this.

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