A Decision Framework: Using the S Curve & T Model

While thinking of my first blog topic for this year, a penny dropped when I found a connection between 3 seemingly disconnected observations.

• Working with the ServiceNow partner eco-system for over the past 22 months, it is evident that resource attrition/turnover is the number one pain point for partners running ServiceNow practices.
• Reading Ravi Venkatesan’s “What the heck do I do with my life” brought to fore the concept of S curves and meta-skills such as Learning Agility.
• Talking to a dear friend and a colleague on a potential upcoming opportunity resulted in the awareness that as people leaders we are probably not providing enough coaching on how decision frameworks can be used before making complex decisions.

Let me take you through a few concepts before laying out a decision framework.

The Vicious Cycle: Using the ServiceNow platform and practitioners that have made a career working on projects on this platform, I want to show you how attrition is a vicious cycle. The Now platform has so much to offer and practitioners get enough projects to get a decent amount of competence relatively fast. Let us say you have basic platform skills and learn how to build catalogs, create business rules and UI Scripts. While you have all of these skills, you haven’t worked on projects that require you to build integrations. There are other similar skills on the platform that you haven’t built competence solely because you never had a chance. During this time, you have peer pressure coming in the form of your friends and colleagues moving to their next company. This tempts you to look at similar options. You apply for the next job. The next job typically relies on your original competence and doesn’t necessarily offer you different exposure to develop additional competence. And the cycle repeats.

S-Curve: Sociologist E M Rogers popularized a model for innovation disruption that has now found favor in a lot of other fields including skill development. Ravi Venkatesan talks about this in his latest book and many other HR leaders have spoken about this model as well. The below representation will give a decent idea of the S-model. ( Image sourced from https://whitneyjohnson.com/lean-in-surfing-the-s-curve-how-to-disrupt-yourself-and-why/)

As practitioners put in days, weeks, and months of practice, they will speed up and move up the S-Curve, developing competence and the confidence that accompanies it. This is the sweet spot part of the S -Curve, where you are essentially in a state of “flow”. As practitioners approach mastery, tasks become easier and easier. Although this is satisfying for a while, we get bored pretty soon as we are no longer in a state of “flow”.

The vicious cycle we talked about earlier, essentially keeps you perpetually in a comfort zone but it also makes you susceptible to getting bored rather easily.

The T Model: When it comes to developing skills, there is always this question of breadth versus depth. To be able to make a real impact, what really works is that people develop a T-shaped skills profile: a broad set of generally applicable skills, that is supplemented by a spike of specific expertise.

Reference: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/operations-blog/ops-40-the-human-factor-a-class-size-of-1)

As you work on a new project, start a new learning program, or go to a new employer are you growing in the horizontal direction of the T Model, or are you growing in the vertical direction of the T model. To understand this slightly better, let us look at this model through the lens of a ServiceNow practitioner. Understanding the basic platform skills be it flow designer, UI Builder, Mobile App Builder, Integration Hub, Catalog builders helps us on the horizontal line of the T. If one starts focusing on say one category of workflow – let’s say technology workflows and builds skills around ITSM, Event Management, Health Log Analytics, Service Mapping, Discovery, etc that is building depth. Essentially this caters to the vertical line of the T.

The Decision Framework - When you are deciding your next project or your next job, what are those principles against which you will evaluate before you make your decision? Here are a few based on the above concepts:

What is your S-Curve? Identifying this at the right level helps you align your actions accordingly. Are you looking at a trend as your current S curve ( eg: Digital Transformation) Are you looking at a technology platform as your current S curve ? ( eg: ServiceNow) Are you looking at a specific area within the technology platform as your S curve ? (eg: specific workflow solutions on the technology platform - say low code/no code)

If you are looking at the first 2, be ready to invest more time. In fact, the former 2 can be seen as a portfolio of multiple S curves of the latter.

Where are you on the S-Curve? After identifying the right S-curve you need to know where is it that you are on this S-curve. Are you at the launch point ? Are you in the sweet spot ? Are you at master level and ready to jump to the next one?

To answer this you need to be authentic to yourself. ?

What are the skills I need for my current journey on the S-Curve? Map your current skills on the T model. What level of breadth will facilitate growth in your current S-curve? What level of depth will facilitate growth in your current S-curve?

Your current employer may have a career architecture framework that can help you.

The Role of People Managers: In a McKinsey survey conducted in August 2020 of 1,240 business leaders around the world,?nearly 80 percent of respondents characterized capability building as extremely or very important to the long-term. Here are 5 things that People Managers can do to build capability using the above decision framework:

1. Help practitioners identify the S curve of each?individual. If I were to take the example of a people manager responsible for a ServiceNow practitioner, he or she has to get a clear sense of the S curve applicable to the individual. This doesn’t mean pushing individuals to just take a bunch of certifications.
2. Then help them get a sense of where they are within the S curve – The metric here is not certifications or anything, rather actual demonstratable experience.
3. What is a portfolio of S curves that you can offer to the practitioner. Given there are operational dynamics ( eg customers wanting to hold a resource to do the same sort of work for a long time), what can you do to offer a different experience? Stretch assignments and initiatives are one way to look at it.
4. If you have a career architecture framework in place, use it to identify the breadth of skills that will help the practitioner.
5. If you have a career architecture framework in place, use it to identify the depth of skills that will help the practitioner.

Note: for 4 and 5, if career architecture models are not in place, you can still use the T Model to go about this.