The Trivium: Ancient Wisdom of Soft Skills

We’ve all probably been there. You're busy doing your job, the thing you were hired to do and the thing you have valuable skills in when a message comes through.

You read it. It’s yet another invitation to attend some training or other on soft skills or communication or some other seemingly trivial extra. You roll your eyes back so far you nearly fall off your chair and start scheming on how you get out of it.

But before you do, hang on just a second because there’s actually something useful to your career going on here. As skilled IT workers, admin people or accountants, it’s logical to assume that your primary skill set involves the technical skills you have. Soft skills are generic and uninteresting.?

Yet a thousand years ago, we humans figured out that this assumption wasn’t true. In fact, the opposite is the case. Very many people can be trained to work with numbers or code. Fewer can be trained to talk to people effectively. Let’s look at what happened.

Ancient Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle, figured out that education, and hence effectiveness, has to begin somewhere. This basic insight, that education has a definable foundation, was picked up by the world’s first universities and was used as the basis of education for over a thousand years. But what exactly IS that foundation?

In the Middle Ages, it went under the name of the trivium or the place where three roads meet. This meeting place was the foundation upon which all further enquiry, and therefore all further progress, was based. Those three roads, or subjects, were grammar, logic and rhetoric. Or, in today’s HR terms, “soft skills.”

Grammar was based on the idea that thoughts had to be expressed with precision and that mindful writing was essential.?

Logic was the assembly of these well-considered sentences into arguments that could be understood and used to persuade, explain or defend.?

Rhetoric was the art of speaking publicly and using your words and your logic to deliver your views publicly.

I’d say these are still pretty foundational to today’s corporate leaders, yet they are routinely ignored or worse, they are sidelined and looked at with amused contempt. But in the medieval university, all subsequent topics could only be studied once these foundational subjects had been mastered.

You can be a brilliant code writer, you can administer any number of hedge funds,? and you can be in charge of a highly successful sales team. But if you ignore the foundational skills, then your house is built on quicksand and one day, disaster will find you. After all, no matter how skilled you are at tech, if you can’t explain what you’re doing coherently and speak publicly and convincingly about it, how effective are you as a team member, really?

So the next time you get an invitation to develop your soft skills, try not to think of it as some annoying HR initiative and think about it for what it really is. The sum total of human experience, as expressed in antiquity and in the great medieval centres of learning, is urging you to take soft skills even more seriously than your tech skills. They knew how essential it is to success.?