Hey Reader,

Welcome to the 22nd edition of the 3-2-1 (check out previous issues here).

This one started with a post from Jolene Skinner at MongoDB lamenting how the skills-based movement is distracting us from the real problem we need to solve. It charged my brain for the rest of the day. The problem, in five words: skills sit still, work doesn't.

Let's get into it.

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3 Things for Work (in L&D)

Why the skills-based movement doesn't work for most companies (Jolene Skinner, LinkedIn)

• Jolene argues that L&D's obsession with skills taxonomies makes us miss the context in which skills are applied: capabilities like curiosity and judgment on real work. She also questions whether the technical skills we keep cataloging are even still required. She leads culture, talent and development at MongoDB, and this post sparked the whole edition.

• 🏋 Effort ≈ 3 min read

Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze? (Talent Strategy Group)

• The most thorough takedown of the skills movement I've found. Marc Effron works through 17 questions the vendors selling skills-based organizations should be able to answer, and finds they can't produce evidence the squeeze pays off: no quantified benefits, heavy disruption, and simpler existing solutions ignored. Send it to whoever owns your taxonomy budget.

• 🏋 Effort ≈ 25 min read

Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice (Burning Glass Institute + Harvard Business School)

• The say-do gap in numbers. Companies loudly dropped degree requirements, so researchers checked what actually happened to hiring: fewer than 1 in 700 new hires changed. Announcing a skills-based policy is easy. Changing how you evaluate people on real work is the part almost nobody did.

• 🏋 Effort ≈ 15 min read

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2 Things for Life

Orca headbutts a sunfish so hard it explodes (YouTube)

• Crazy video of orcas off California smashing a fish carcass into pieces to feed their young. Or are they playing? Watch and decide.

• 🏋 ~2 min watch

Japan has a new word for how hot it is (The New York Times)

• Japan's weather agency added a new category this year: kokushobi, "brutally hot day," for anything above 104F. Nearly half a million people voted on the name. And they're not the only country changing the way they speak because of warming weather.

• 🏋 Effort ≈ 5 min read

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1 Idea from Me

Skills sit still. Work doesn't.

Every company has a brilliant person whose best ideas die in meetings.

A staff engineer at a late-stage company told me that three years ago, as a new hire, he'd quickly and correctly diagnosed that the engineering for the company's iOS apps was wrong. He then spent two years trying and failing to change it.

He had every skill a taxonomy would measure: technical know-how, analysis, writing, presenting. But he pitched his solutions in the direct way he learned at his previous company, which earned him a reputation for being abrasive. Leaders shut down every proposal, so he stopped sharing them. In his view, the company lost years of improved app performance.

He didn't lack skills. The problem was skills sit still. Work doesn't. Performance is what happens when a person applies what they know to this problem, with these people, in this culture.

He admitted to me that he didn't ask "all the why, when, who, what to be able to properly pitch it." That's a judgment failure. Not about the code, about the situation: he misjudged the people, the culture, the sequencing, and how his ideas would land. He lacked judgment-in-context. As he put it: "If you can influence two out of five people in the room, you still failed. That's not critical mass."

Another engineer who participated in our program at a different company had a similar experience. None of his colleagues were adopting his tool, so he tried harder to explain it. After going through the program, he learned to get curious about how other developers work, and by asking questions discovered his diagnosis was wrong. He changed what he built, and adoption followed. No persuasion necessary. His summary: "The skills that have gotten me [to my current role] are not what will get me to the next level."

This is why hiring for and training skills alone doesn't work. Neither failure was a skills issue. What humans need is practice with peers, guided by a shared language, to develop judgment-in-context and the ability to influence others to take action.

Sometimes we hire the smartest people with the highest proficiencies in the skills we think matter and expect them to perform. But 85 years of selection research says performance is best predicted by only two things: how fast people learn and whether they follow through. You can't train those two directly. What you can train is what they produce on contact with real work: judgment, empathy, self-awareness, the ability to carry a room. We've seen that these capabilities develop in the context they're needed and travel with the person.

Stop auditing what your people know. Start looking at what happens when they apply it. That's where performance lives, and no inventory can see it. It gets built one way: reps. Real problems, real colleagues, a shared language for talking about what worked, and enough repetition that the judgment becomes theirs.

Your company already has its version of the engineers in my story: right about a need to change, but stuck moving people to take action. Here's your move this week. Find that person. Put the problem they've been failing to move in front of a small group of peers, and have them work on it together, out loud. You'll learn more about your organization's real capability gap in that one hour than a skills taxonomy will tell you in a year.

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That's it for this week - enjoy your Sunday!

I'll be back in two weeks ✌️

Andrew

P.S. 👉 I asked on LinkedIn who else is developing judgment with actual receipts to show for it. If someone came to mind while you read this, reply with their name. Especially if I don't know them.