The Skills Matrix is Dead, Long Live the Skills Matrix!

Advancing Undercurrent’s People Strategy

By Dara Blumenthal, PhD and Nathan Snyder of Nature of Work

Work is increasingly discontinuous, nonlinear, and requires whole-system thinking in most organizational environments. Simply put, it’s getting more complex.

However, most organizations even the more progressive companies (e.g. ones that are orienting to self-organization and self-management) have not evolved their thinking towards human performance in their attempt to meet increased complexity.

Performance is still thought of as a quality on a spectrum of linear progress. This is akin to transforming your organization’s design into a living, self-managing system, but continuing to your treat employees (i.e. those accomplishing the work of the organization) as though they’re working a production line. This thinking is exemplified in the continued prevalence of the skills matrix.

In order for organizations to realize their goals in increasingly complex environments, they need to move beyond a model of performance, skillset, and mindset based on discrete skills in linear progression. Instead, we need to match our thinking, understanding, and development of performance with the increased complexity we face.

Undercurrent’s Skills Matrix

We’ve worked with skills matrices across legacy organizations including Pepsico, American Express, and…