One of the most difficult critical skills to describe, and to develop skill in, is ‘Unlearning.’ In order to do something new we often need to unlearn what we think we already know. Unlearning is not only hard to describe, it is hard to do. We suggest a few techniques for unlearning that may be helpful.

Core Concepts: Critical Skill On Ibbaka Talent platform, we categorize them as "foundational skills" - the skills necessary for learning or supporting other skills. Skills that allow us to think independently about something objectively and critically expressing thoughts, ideas and beliefs in a way that is easy to understand.

Ibbaka periodically conducts surveys on critical skills. Our most recent survey was in January 2022. In this post we share some preliminary results and note what others are finding in related work. The full report will come in mid February.

What are the critical questions we should be asking about skills as we enter 2022? How can we develop answers to these questions? In 2022, the ability to connect goals to skills and people (perhaps mediated by roles) will be critical to strategy execution.

Learning is a critical skill and reflecting on how we learn and how we can help others learn is an important part of work. In this post we introduce the Ibbaka Learning Journey Map. We this map when designing learning and for the activation and embedding of new capabilities. It is a concept blend of journey maps and learning theory.

What critical skills will matter most in 2022? What skills do you want to develop? What skills does your organization need? This survey asks about critical skills and puts them in the context of the business and thinking frameworks we will be using and major technology trends. The results will be published in late January.

Deep knowledge and specialization are an important part of expertise. But sometimes the expert knowledge acts like blinders. One of the best ways to overcome this is by combining ideas from different disciplines to come up with a new solution. This is the critical skill of ‘concept blending.’

Skill diversity is important at the individual, team and organizational levels. What do we mean by skill diversity? What value does diversity provide? How can we achieve it? Ibbaka Talent gives insights into skill diversity and a place to act to increase the skill diversity of individual, teams and organizations..

Reading is one of the most important foundational skills, but what does it really mean to be an expert or deep reader? Deep reading relies on a combination of immersion (related to flow), reflection and connection. One can learn to apply each of these enabling skills to improve one’s own reading.

Brandon Hall Group, a leading research firm in the talent and learning space, is currently conducting an important survey on How Do You Build Teams for the Future of Work? We plan to tag teams on our platform with different types of teams and see if there are any differences in skill patterns. What questions about skills and teams would you like to pose and see answered?

Sustained performance of any task at a high level requires flow. The total entry into what is being done.

In a world that moves faster and faster, do we have the patience to find the bright side of waiting? When "amazon-next-day-delivery" is a standard, four days seems like an eternity. Can one survive for four days without the Internet? Patience is a critical skill. The patience to wait and give thoughts, designs, people and relationships the time they need.

Critical skills are, well, critical. A lot of Ibbaka’s work turns around identifying critical skills in different contexts. Identifying critical skills is a good start. But once you have identified them, how do you develop them? We investigate several strategies in this post.

“Curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought her back.” Curiosity is an important behavior in a shifting and uncertain world. But is it a skill? Perhaps not. It is better described as an attitude. But there are important skills that support curiosity, and it is critical to many different business functions.

Critical thinking has been identified as a critical skill in many different contexts. Just as important to design thinking is generative thinking, where new ideas are generated, opened up and explored. We spoke with design thinking thought leader GK vanPatter to get his insights into the importance of generative thinking.

Visual skills are important to many design disciplines. Are visual thinking skills and visual communication skills the same thing?

With everything changing so much around us, with all the uncertainty and questions about what will happen post-Covid, we should resolve to nurture creativity and see the world through a different set of eyes, or we should say, skills. Creativity, problem-solving, analytical thinking and critical thinking, active learning, and listening are the skills of the future.

Trade off triangles are a useful way to see and manage trade offs. In project management there is the classic Time-Quality-Cost triangle. Google uses the triangle of Capacity-Latency-Quality to optimize the search experience. Personally we need to trade off Health-Wealth-Time. Being able to recognize and then manage trade offs in design, business and personal life is a critical skill.

Customer journey maps have become a key tool in customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) design work. They are one of the best ways to organize service designs. We recommend calling out trust as an explicit part of these maps. Trust and skill management are tightly connected. To succeed with skill management people have to trust the system, the data and, most importantly, each other.

Trust is the glue that lets us work together. It is a skill, a critical skill even? What other skills might trust depend on? What skills does trust enable? Can we help each other to learn how to trust?