Note: At Ibbaka we encourage scepticism and critique of what we do. David is one of our best sceptics. He is also a concept designer of some brilliance and has pioneered a lot of the advanced analytics, clustering and data interpretation work at Ibbaka. He has a mind that can make surprising lateral connections that have changed how we think about many things.

When I first saw my skills light up on Ibbaka Talent I was delighted. I had imported my LinkedIn skills. Most of the skills were immediately categorized by the system and given the category colours. With some self-assessment of the skills, the colourful ribbon and skill cloud took shape. The cloud was easy to read and gave an instant sense of what I can do. The ribbon was hard to read but looked great.

And that was that. Once and done. 

Well, from my fog I could faintly hear nagging voices telling me to define my roles on teams, accept suggested skills, rate the skills of other team members, and more. Once in a while I would peek at the notifications, see that I had accumulated yet another zillion skills to rate, shudder, and quickly go back into my fog, trying to focus on my real work. 

This has been the pattern of every single organization that has used Talent. Some champion would promote people cataloging their skills. Most would do that within two or three days. And then nothing. There might be a couple of nagging sessions where people would do a little more. Then nothing again.

This is the engagement problem. The regular crowd (the people being corralled by the champion) have to

1. Believe that by continually doing a lot of stuff they will get something out of it sometime or other, and 

2. Want to do it.

Why not just admit that “once and done” is the way it is in the space of individuals setting up their skill profiles. Sure people continue growing and changing, and they might want to reflect the changes in their profiles, once in a while. 

Is that it for engagement, then? Not by a long shot. 

We know from Jean Umiker-Sebeok that there are at least four strategies for consuming meaning. She calls them Pragmatic, Critical, Utopian, and Diversionary. 

The Pragmatic strategy is utilitarian. People in this mode want a concrete payback for time spent. While all of Talent's messaging to individuals makes utilitarian-sounding promises, there is no concrete payback for time spent; people do not come away with the satisfaction that they have something new to help them solve the problems presented by the world.

But some of Talent's subscribers can be thought of as also trying out the Utopian strategy, which involves an imaginative self-exploration, preferably as a joint achievement with companions. Here the champion with Talent is a facilitator who guides the group of people through an activity that enables them to see themselves and the group differently. Just from their "once and done" skill profiles, Talent can show the group what they have in common with each other and also what each individual can uniquely offer. (The same information can pragmatically help HR see strengths and weaknesses, but that's not who I'm talking about here.) 

The Diversionary strategy sees the world as an amusement park. Talent might offer some tidbits of amusement, like getting people to guess who some skill cloud belongs to. 

The Critical strategy favours the acquisition of ideas. For people in this mode, getting their skills into a 'proper' order would be an end in itself. Talent provides some ordering features, and may consider even more for the critical types.

Pragmatic-sounding promises to the regular people who are expected to fill out skill profiles don’t work because there is no concrete payback. But a mutually achieved Utopian takeaway might be motivation enough for the regular people to want to continue the Talent subscription, justified by the natural churn of people leaving and onboarding, generating updates to the “corporate selfie.” The takeaway is a deeper understanding of who each person is and how they connect to each other across the paths of their skills.