Getting a “Handle” on Creative Agility: The Soft Skills That Produce Playmakers
How handles — improvisational intelligence on and off the court — enable individuals to provide value under any circumstance
By Crystal Yao, Shikshya Khatiwada, and James Cook
Handles (n.): a way of identifying a basketball player’s dribbling expertise, or creative intelligence
Measurable and trainable hard skills have been a hallmark of the American workplace ever since scientific management theory of the First Industrial Revolution transformed skilled craftsmen into efficient laborers.
Today, however, the core competency of a good knowledge worker no longer revolves around consistency, speed, and conformity.
In a world where emerging technologies are now disrupting old business models, adaptability, agility, and creativity — traditionally labeled as “soft” skills — have become the key drivers for success.
The ability to pick things up quickly, learn on the spot, and generate insights based on incomplete information are considered “soft” because they are harder to identify immediately or measure effectively.
Yet, they are what set apart the easily substitutable workers who are good at following instructions, from the ones who have the creative agility to adapt to various situations.
These soft skills are what make those individuals indispensable, because they enable them to provide value under any circumstance.
As such, their handle on creativity becomes their signature flair.
In many ways, the crafty footwork of a ball handler’s on-court movement is analogous to a skilled worker’s ability to think on his feet — extremely important yet woefully undervalued in the professional marketplace
Ball Handling
In basketball vernacular, “handles” describes a player’s ability to dribble or maneuver a basketball around defenders. On the court, a point guard’s ability to weave in and out of traffic to finish at the rim or create an open shot for himself is what distinguishes an elite player from a good player.
These are the playmakers of the game, because they have the creative intelligence, freestyling ability, depth perception, touch, and hand-eye-feet coordination to accurately gauge all of the factors on the court — the distance and angle to the rim, the position of defenders spread across the floor — and still make a play regardless of unforeseen obstacles.
Handles are merely the identification of a player’s creative abilities amidst competition. Ball handling at its core is a skill of anticipation, improvisation, and adaptation that when executed perfectly, makes the player unbeatable.
And not just the player himself — these playmakers elevate everyone else around them as well.
Ball handling at its core is a skill of anticipation, improvisation, and adaptation that when executed perfectly, makes the player unbeatable.
Nonetheless, just as recruiters do in the workplace, college and professional scouts readily fall victim to prioritizing hard performance metrics (i.e. how many points a player can score) over the less traditionally evaluative qualities.
In many ways, the crafty footwork of a ball handler’s on-court movement is analogous to a skilled worker’s ability to think on his feet — extremely important yet woefully undervalued in the professional marketplace.
This is in part because recruiters and internal talent managers would rather hone in on and develop skills with more proof of evidence. A coder’s ability to pick up new languages on the spot, for example, is less transparent than another coder’s measured years of training.
But just because a skill is not quantifiable, per se, does not mean that it is not valuable and worth training.
Soft skills have long been perceived as innate skills — ones that cannot be taught. As such, many believe that attemping to develop or search for those intangible skills is a waste of valuable resources that should instead be put towards more technical needs.
Yet, the elite ball handlers aren’t just born with their talent; they are the ones who have practiced day after day to make their handles feel innate and second nature so that they excel in the heat of competition.
It becomes a bag of tricks from which they can pull out brilliance; a mastery of practiced perfectionism that permits success despite unpredictable disruptions.
And while they may not be easily identifiable on paper or translatable to numbers, these are the behaviors and performances observed in real-time that set apart the successful from the mediocre.
Basketball, in simplest terms, is about getting the ball through the net.
Business is about consistently delivering bottom line profits in a rapidly evolving context.
Creative agility — the handles on the court and the “soft” skills in the workplace — is what enables the winning of the game.
Through IBM’s internal and market facing assets, we’ve been accelerating implementation of behavioral strengths and soft skills assessments into our reinvention journey. These skills are a valuable asset to the future of IBM’s growth and success. We have transformed multiple times in the past and are excited about the limitless resourcefulness of our talent. Learn about some of our new Talent and Engagement and Talent Optimization offerings here.
