21st century skills
What are they?
I started thinking about 21st century skills in Work’s changing:
- Social skills connected with collaboration and boundary-blurring conversations (across knowledge disciplines, functions, companies etc)
- Social skills connected with cultural diversity
- Listening to customers and colleagues — what do they need and is this changing?
- Understanding performance environments — what do people need to work and learn together, given that the workplace is now so mobile and distributed and knowledge so complex and inter-disciplinary?
- Constantly learning to sense, learn, unlearn and adapt.
And that’s only scratching at the surface. Other skills will be highlighted as the posts in this set of collections (All about MOOCs, Calling all Instigators and Smart Working) are added.
Complexity
What do I mean by complexity? This Wikipedia entry says that “ In general usage, complexity tends to be used to characterize something with many parts in intricate arrangement.”
But that’s complicated, not complex. The entry goes on to talk about complexity in terms of interactions among objects — and that’s the essence of complexity. But for me it’s more than that. I think that complexity takes on another dimension when people interact.
We are born with capabilities and personalities but these are not fixed. We interact with our environments and are changed by them. We learn and adapt. I can only speak for myself but I behave differently according to who I am with, how well I know someone and what the context is — formal, informal, familiar, new and perhaps unsettling?
Organisations
If you think about it, organisations don’t really exist. What do exist are inter-connected groups of people interacting to make things happen or to prevent things from happening. That’s it. All the rest — support systems like IT, HR and facilities — is all about giving people the tools, rules and places people need to get on with it.
Consider if you and I were working together. I do or say something and this might influence what you do or say. Your response to me similarly has the potential to influence what I do or say. And so it continues. The dynamics of this exchange and the unpredictable / uncertain outcomes makes it complex.
Even with just two people interacting and influencing each other, already complex, you have what I see as the additional source of complexity that comes from the fact that we ourselves change and develop. High divorce rates in many countries suggest how difficult it is for two people to continue to see eye-to-eye.
So it no surprise then that organisations can be emotionally challenging places to work when we have to learn to work with people in complex relationships, where knowledge itself is the outcome of increasingly complex contexts, and where the complexity multiplies with the number and diversity of people that are involved.
Other skills to add to the list at the top of this post are social skills connected with understanding how to interpret and make sense of relationship dynamics, and ability to influence (not control) attitudes and behaviours.
Skills for specific complex contexts
The skills mentioned this far apply more or less according to context. All organisations are complex to some extent — they all involve people — but they then vary in complexity arising from things like:
- Cultural diversity
- Changing balance of power towards connected, demanding customers — because this implies skills in setting performance conditions that make agility and responsiveness to their demands more likely to happen than not
- Blurring, inter-connected organisational boundaries
- The extent to which knowledge is bleeding-edge — perhaps in new industries at the intersection of art and science, and involving new materials and technologies.
Universal skills for complex contexts
The skills in this section are essential for thinking and acting in all complex social contexts. Let’s start with creativity and challenging the status quo.
Challenge the status quo
In the 2010 IBM Global CEO Survey Capitalizing on complexity, CEOs selected creativity as the most important leadership attribute. From the report:
“Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles, particularly to engage with a new generation of employees, partners and customers.”
I heard the British scientist Baroness Susan Greenfield speaking about creativity around that time. She also very strongly linked creativity and the development of cognitive skills to challenge.
Adults, she said, are “metaphorical beings” who construct understanding through concepts, metaphors and critical reflection — drawing on insights and understanding from past, present and future, and making mental leaps across inter-disciplinary fields of knowledge.
Creating new insight begins with challenging dogma, which means challenging existing neural connections. But challenge is not enough. The next the next step is to deconstruct, to bring together unusual elements — to “see one thing in terms of something else.” The final step is to have an ‘aha’ moment and this is where new cognitive connections are made.
Why challenge the status quo? Because attitudes and minds easily become fixed especially if a way of doing something was effective in the past. Why change a winning formula? Because it is no longer appropriate. Constantly asking questions, evaluating how things are done and remaining vigilant are vital because the outside business environment is so unpredictable and dynamic.
Post-graduate level skills
It turns out that post-graduate level learning is all about developing operational, intellectual and social skills to be able to think and act in complex contexts.
This requirement of post-graduate level learning is from the document that spells out the characteristics of different levels of graduate and post-graduate learning to universities in England and Wales, who interpret and apply them to the courses they offer:
“Deal with complex issues both systematically and creatively, make sound judgements in the absence of complete data, and communicate conclusions clearly to specialist and non-specialist audiences”
So there’s creativity again.
The learning context for post-graduate learning is full of conflict, and ethical and operating dilemmas. You have to be able to evaluate the learning context — and of course for organisations that means appreciating the consequences of relationship dynamics, alliances and inter-connections.
In the face of all these moving targets, you have to be able to make judgments about courses of action — choosing what you are going to do from a range of alternatives, all of which have unpredictable and risky outcomes.
How do you choose? Using what criteria? Why those criteria rather than others? What ethical and moral judgements are you having to make? Where are the risks? And many other questions. Exactly how do you go about developing these operational, intellectual and social skills?
Think critically
Critical thinking at post-graduate level is about understanding context, constant challenge and awareness of alternatives. Here’s what it is in a bit more detail:
1. Ability to scope and identify interacting elements of a problem — or what you think they are
2. Ability to assess risks in the process
3. Ability to challenge assumptions (your own and those of other people)
4. Ability to evaluate possible options from among alternatives
5. Ability to identify and defend selection criteria
6. Ability to reflect on the effects of paradoxes, constraints and incomplete knowledge
7. Ability to use evidence to draw valid and justifiable conclusions in making a case for action.
The next post looks at how Mentored Open Online Conversations nurture 21st century skills.
