Shift #2: Conversation-in-Action--Taking Soft Skills Seriously

In an earlier post, I spoke of the origins of the missing basics of engineering and discussed what I called the new missing basics or the 5+1 deep shifts. I listed these as follows:

1. The shift from obedience to courage.
2. The shift from technical rationality to conversation-in-action.
3. The shift from rational action to embodied and whole-hearted leadership.
4. The shift from language as description to language as generative action.
5. The shift from planning to effectuation.
6. The shift from either-or decisions to polarity management.

In this piece, I'll elaborate on the the second shift from technical rationality to conversation-in-action. The journey starts with the unlikely pairing of Yankee coach Yogi Berra and MIT Professor Don Schoen.

The Yogi-Schoen Shift: From Applied Theory to Conversation-in-Action

Yogi Berra is famous for his Yogi-isms, twisted turns of phrase that often have the ring of truth. One of his sayings is the poster child for Shift #2:

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

At the heart of how we teach in K-12, in colleges and universities, and in professional schools is the (largely mistaken idea) that practice is merely the application of well vetted theory to practice. Schoen's text, The Reflective Practitioner, called this out in a scholarly way back in 1983. In particular, Schoen made the distinction between technical rationality on the one hand, and reflection-in-action on the other.

Technical rationality is the idea that practice is the mere application of theory to some particular case. Yogi's dictum starts out by gesturing at TR and then questioning it. In philosophy the term "epistemology" refers to theories of how we come know, and we can say that technical rationality is the preferred theory of practical knowing of the modern university. Teach them theory and good practice will follow. For nearly a thousand years, university professors and students have been busy collecting, curating, and passing on theoretical knowledge with the idea that this will somehow work out in the real world, but Schoen argues persuasively that this epistemology of practice largely misunderstands much, if not most, professional practice.

In a convincing march through a variety of different professions, Schoen observed that working professionals rarely spend much time referring to theory (or they do so in a routine and matter-of-fact way). Instead, he noticed more specifically that professionals are often in conversation with each other, with themselves, with clients, with other professionals with differing expertise attempting through deep reflection to make sense of the particulars of the situation they face. This conversational sense-making is so important, I have given it the special name conversation-in-action or CIA. Deep conversation is fundamental to all professional practice, and yet it is odd how many professions (certainly engineering as a critical example) seem to denigrate the implied skills in conversation by calling them "soft skills" as though the technical skills are fundamental and the CIA skills are unimportant or perhaps obvious to everyone.

NLQ = Noticing, Listening & Question

At ThreeJoy Associates, we use the acronym NLQ to designate the core CIA skills as noticing, listening, and questioning and therein lies part of the problem. Human beings routinely overestimate their capabilities and the components of NLQ appear to be something most of us already are quite expert in Sometimes when I recount the components of NLQ, I can see eyes glazing over. "Check, check, check, and I've got the t-shirt." In my own case, when I attended coach training at Georgetown University, on the first day of six months of hard work, our instructors asked us "What do you notice?" and I recall getting pissed off. My mind was screaming "I paid 5 figures to be here, and you're asking me what I notice? I came here to learn some new skills!!" But over the course of that training, I came to understand that average capability at NLQ should not be confused with deep skill at NLQ, and great practitioners can use the secrets of executive coaches to go deeper.

In fact, at ThreeJoy, we define the notion of a shift as follows:

A shift is a small change in something that we already do fairly well that gives great power.

In this way, it is important to pay attention to subtlety and nuance in practice that helps us go deeper and become more effective practitioners.

From "Soft" to "Shift" Skills: Core vs Derivative Skills

When employers speak of "soft skills" they often mean things like communication, leadership, teamwork, or other high-level practices (see the outer circles in the figure above), but these things are treated as disconnected and largely unrelated to one another. At ThreeJoy, the practice of high-level soft skills (what we call "derivative shift skills" is largely dependent on core shift skills and the core of the core is NLQ. Oftentimes, derivative skills are improved quickly through concentrated effort on NLQ together with a few key distinctions critical to the higher-level derivative skill set.

Filling Out the Core

As we continue our march through the 5+1 shifts, we will build a better understanding of the core shift skills and how they can help us navigate the complexity of fast-paced times. ThreeJoy clients enjoy regular practice and improvement of both core and derivative shift skills in the ThreeJoy? Coaching Club (see here). For more information about the club or conversation-in-action around this topic write to me at [email protected].

David E. Goldberg is perhaps best known as an AI pioneer (genetic algorithms) and for his first book Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning (1989); his latest book is A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education (2014). In 2010, Dave resigned his tenure & a distinguished professorship to work full time for the transformation higher education. A trained leadership coach (Georgetown) and president of ThreeJoy Associates, a change leadership, coaching, training & consulting firm in Douglas, MI, Dave works with an amazing cohort of change agents both in- and outside of his ThreeJoy Coaching Club. Dave can be reached at [email protected].