Connecting the dots: Why Task Intelligence will be the rocket-fuel for Skill Intelligence and skills-informed talent management practices.

About 12 months ago I had a conversation with Aaron McEwan from Gartner about his views and perspectives on skills.? Aaron is someone I respect and admire for his forward thinking insights and often contrary views on issues relating to work and talent management.

I was quite surprised with Aaron thoughts on skills – he acknowledged they were important but believed they shouldn’t be the primary focus, or currency, of business.??

He said, “The work, and the tasks making up the work, are more the focus of attention for business / workers.” ?he advocated for a shift from skills to a practical focus on the tasks or work that needs to be done.

If I am honest, I thought this was an interesting perspective but was counter-zeitgeist and a lone voice in the chorus of skills-cheerleaders. I didn’t give this too much thought until later in 2024 when a few other dots began to connect, and I began to realise Aaron was on to something.

So, what changed for me?

Dot 1: I attended several conferences last year and listened to some amazing speakers, a few of whom started to present on work intelligence and why it will be crucial in the future. One speaker had a start-up business recently funded in the US to support the systematic implementation of Generative AI into organisations reliant on a task-level understanding of work.?

Dot 2: I met with Stephanie Reuss and Victoria Stuart from Beamible in mid-2024. This is an Australian based technology business helping its clients analyse work at a task level to identify opportunities to introduce AI and automation, and to lift the productivity and performance of teams. However, the platform isn’t just about efficiencies and automation, it helps to identify work that provides energy to teams or alternatively drains them of it. This human-centricity is a real product differentiator allowing organisations to consider all stakeholders when they are analysing and redesigning work. TQSolutions now partners with Beamible to analyse the work of HR / Talent teams as part of our consulting work.

Dot 3: My conversation with Dart Lindsley on his podcast show ‘Work for Humans’ in Dec 2024 highlighted to me (and Dart) that it is possible to bridge the gap between Skills / AI Adoption and his world of Experience Design and Multi-Sided Management theory.

Dart has been a significant skills sceptic who shared this with me in late 2023: “I think that the desire to talk about skills is a distant engineering approach. Let's tag everybody so that we can manipulate them at scale.”

However, I think we now both agree, done in the right way and with humans at the centre, a skills-informed approach to talent management (career development and mobility, career pathing, personalised learning etc) combined with the introduction of AI and automation can be used to enhance the quality of work being performed by teams, lifting people’s work energy and engagement levels. Bizarrely, both Dart and Beamible developed their own version of the ‘Bubble Chart’ which they use to measure the organisational value and human enjoyment of projects and work in general.

Link to the podcast episode on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/Work-For-Humans-Podcast

Dot 4: Several skills-centric technology vendors are moving towards deep work analysis and task intelligence. The most active in 2024 has been Reejig with Siobhan Savage ???? leading the charge in this re-frame. Reejig first launched its Work Ontology in April 2023 and then doubled down with the launch of industry specific ‘Workforce Re-invention Blueprints’. Reejig is using something called the AI Potential Index (AIPI) to identify tasks and roles with high-AI and automation potential. This task intelligence can be used as the basis for workforce transformation and re-skilling programs.

The CEO of TechWolf , Jeroen Van Hautte ?? has also started to promote the importance of Task Intelligence, as seen with his most recent articles on ths topic. His December post was sub-titled: Bridging skills and tasks to redefine work with AI.

Link to article: https://tinyurl.com/Tech-Wolf-Article

This week I am also meeting a well known global vendor to review their product roadmap, and their 'task-intelligence' play is on the agenda too.

Dot 5: I have been enthralled with the online activity and information sharing of Sandra Loughlin, PhD from EPAM Systems during the past 12 months. I have had several opportunities to connect with Sandra directly and listened to many of her public interviews and podcasts. Yes, you could say I am a bit of a fan! However, what has become very clear to me with the Epam story is the criticality of core data strategy and management.

Epam’s story is unique, they commenced their ‘skills-journey’ 30 years ago when then first came to market, but what I missed originally, which was later confirmed by Sandra, is that they began their task and work intelligence journey 30 years ago too. Work and people data are at the heart of their operations flowing through all critical business and HR related systems.? Sandra has made it very clear to me that this workforce strategy is more of a Data/Tech play than a Talent Management or SBO play.

Sandra said the following on LinkedIn recently: "Task intelligence is soooo important, you guys. If you don't have any information on tasks in your organization, it's impossible to get significant ROI from skills investments."

Here are two really insightful posts by Sandra on this topic recently shared on LinkedIn:

https://tinyurl.com/EPAM-Tasks-1

https://tinyurl.com/EPAM-Tasks-2

Dot 6: In response to one of my posts on LinkedIn Marc Steven Ramos shared an impressive, independent body of research he has been working on during his ‘year off’.?His e-book ‘Tasks vs Skills: Squaring the Circle of Work with Artificial Intelligence’ is a must read for any practitioner in this space. An exploration of his thinking is an article for another day, but his well-argued paper concludes by emphasising the need to move away from a ‘skills-only’ approach to one that integrates skills and tasks.

He suggests “the future workplace won’t be solely skills-based or task-driven, it will harmoniously be both.” ?

Marc’s argument showcases the connection of skills to work and work outputs, contextualising the use of skills to a particular task. This approach embraces the “quantifiable nature of tasks and the qualitative depth of skills.” and I think will be more meaningful to leaders and workers alike, helping them understand skills in a task/work context.

Marc Steven Ramos’s content release: ?https://tinyurl.com/Marc-Steven-Ramos-Material

So as Dot’s 1-6 started to drop and connect, they have reshaped my thinking and point of view on Skills. This week I am presenting at a conference in Melbourne with the topic of Workforce and Talent Strategy in 2025. It will be the first time I attempt to use this visual that explains why I now believe the pressure to introduce AI and Automation (from the C-Suite and Boards) will accelerate the need to analyse work more deeply, at a task level so that automation opportunities can be appropriately costed and evaluated. ?

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Once this analysis of work has been done its re-design incorporating AI and people will be much better understood at both a task and skills level.?The adoption of skills-informed talent management practices will be considerably easier because leaders and workers can now connect skills to their work and they will be clearer on the ‘what’s in it for me’ when adopting various skills-informed approaches.?

There won’t just be one wave of AI/Automation, there will be many as new technology breakthroughs and products are released to the market.

There will be on-going deconstruction and reconstruction of work and jobs and a perpetual need to perform deep work analysis building an organisations task and skills intelligence.?

This is no-longer (and I would argue never was) an HR-thing, this will be driven by the business and its leaders, sure HR will be involved but such work needs cross-functional and cross-business collaboration to be truly successful.

My current opinion is that to successfully use skills in your organisation, you first need to understand work and tasks. This is especially critical as we consider AI and automation opportunities.? So, Aaron, thank you for providing me with this insight back in early 2024, I wish I had explored this deeper with you last year and better understood why you thought this when all around you were thinking something else.

Skills and Tasks – simply two sides of the same coin, that coin being ‘Work’.

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