Quantum skills: How hard is your soft-skill?
Hard-skills & soft-skills are fallacies in a quantum age.
Organizations often focus too much on easily defined skills which relate to specific jobs, and neglect more difficult-to-measure skills, attitudes and perceptions.
Employees are the fleshy sense-organs of an enterprise. Persuasion is needed not only to sell commodities to customers, but engage and inspire your team.
To neglect soft-skills risks undermining the bonds which hold organisations together. These skills are what separate thriving organizations from struggling ones.
What are they?
Hard skills are specific, technical abilities that are typically learned through education or training, and are often related to a specific occupation or industry. Soft skills, on the other hand, are more general, interpersonal abilities that are not specific to a particular occupation or industry.
This is the standard response.
Soft-skills are more general skills. Brilliant.
This definition doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding relations between the two. Or in fact integrating a deeper understanding for practical use.
Hard or soft?
Defining skills as hard or soft suggests that they are mutually exclusive.
Unfortunately skills are not boiled eggs. How can we crack beyond the surface of these restrictive definitions?
How hard is your soft skill?
It may seem that if you cannot bring your apparent skills into a manifest form then you suffer an embarrassing impotency of hardness.
Someone: “Are you really a clown?”
Me: “Yes”
Someone: “How did you become a clown?”
Me: “Well first I went to clown school”
Someone: “Wow! You have a degree in clown?!”
Me: “No, its not an accredited degree - its a clown school”
Person looks disappointed.
True story.
Its unlikely you’ll have certification in soft-skills. Yet, studies show that 85% of a job's success comes from soft-skills and only 15% from hard-skills (Harvard University, the Carnegie Foundation and Stanford Research Center).
The term soft-skill was an invention of the US military.
Between 1968 and 1972 the military was excelling at training troops on how to use machines to do their job, but they began to notice that a lot of what made a group of soldiers victorious was how the group was led. This realization sparked a mission to capture and understand this knowledge.
Initially they had defined map reading as a hard skill because paper is a hard surface, apparently. But they realised that orientation required abilities which were different from skills for machinery.
Leading this mission was Paul G Whitmore, and his team came up with the contrast between working with something that is physically hard like a machine and anything else which is soft to the touch.
From this research, three criteria were created to judge if a skill is ‘soft’ or ‘hard’: degree of interaction with a machine, degree of specificity of behaviour to be performed, and typical kind of ‘on the job’ situation.
The term soft-skills was created sincerely to describe a new form of skills that could not be measured in standard ways. It came out of extensive controlled experiments with IBM, yet despite dedication, conference organizers were not satisfied with the results.
Half a century later and we are still using these phrases.
Measuring these ‘more general’ skills is so difficult because they are inextricably linked to our subjective perception of reality.
And how do you perceive reality?
Can you describe the process in which you feel?
To understand soft-skills we must question the illusive nature of reality.
We may learn a lot from innovations in science about how to measure the immeasurable.
To question this status quo is to drive to the heart of how we perceive. How can we capture this natural occurrence, this fractal into a frame that we can recognize and communicate?
Einstein attempted to understand reality itself through his work on light. His pursuit led him to propose theories on relativity and entanglement.
His theories proposed that there is predetermination in the building blocks of our galaxy.
What does this mean? The deck is rigged. The house always wins.
You have no free choice. Or the choice you have is merely an illusion of your freedom.
Then Max Planck enraged Einstein by theorising that there are forces beyond the speed of light that we do not understand.
It was a heretical idea. A coup d'etat on classical sciences. Why?
Old Albert couldn't comprehend that there is an essential unknowable-ness in our galaxy. “Does the moon disappear when I’m not looking at it?”, he famously said. Today it seems that this is more likely than not.
There was once a time when the quantum field was merely a theoretical idea wrestled by celebrity thinkers. Sure, you have your equations, but how does a caterpillar turn into a butterfly?
Today the quantum field is found manifested in the modest processes of nature all around us.
Morphology of a chrysalis can be explained with quantum tunnelling - basically when a particle suddenly acts as a wave to pass through a solid wall.
This ridiculous phenomenon enables the living organism to self re-organise at astounding speeds that confound the theories of newtonian physics.
How many of us wish we could pass through solid walls?
Mysteries of overlooked phenomena are revealed. Lets take photons hitting a leaf.
Classical biology explains this by the light bouncing around until it finds the place where the process of photosynthesis is sparked.
In fact, recent studies suggest that when light hits the leaf, it suddenly acts as a wave to find the shortest distance to that special part where the reaction takes place.
Today we’re able to put these theories to the test, but back in the 50’s intellectual titan’s warred over how to measure the immeasurable.
”The whole fifty years of continuous brooding have not brought me nearer to the answer to the question ‘What are light quanta?’ Nowadays every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks he knows it, but he is mistaken.”
— Albert Einstein (1951)
The theories of this crazy haired scientist are remarkable yet they aligned with an outdated feudal ideology supporting the ruling classes.
“I am up here - you are down there; therefore I am supposed to be up here and you are supposed to be there.”
The undertone of this ideology recommends us to work hard to get a better predetermined destiny in the next life. Absolve your guilt by recycling your glass. Put a few coins in the collection hat, confess and be forgiven for your sins.
Quantum physics offered us an alternative reality to this determinism.
At the time of inception into the cultural consciousness, post-war Europe was in a process of throwing off the shackles of oppression. Music and culture exported around the world. Austerity gave way to prosperity.
This shift into modern capitalism can be defined by the element of surplus enjoyment
To highlight Slavoj Zizek’s work on surplus enjoyment; when someone goes to confession, before they used to say “Father, I have sinned. I enjoyed myself too much”.
In today’s culture when someone goes to a church they confess “Father, I have sinned, I work too hard. I don’t enjoy myself enough”.
This new found freedom suited the free market of modern capitalism.
Free-will turned into free-love.
Hippie culture grasped the ideas of quantum physics. It aligned with the esoteric belief systems holistically adopted in the new-age.
A shift of scientific thought into the quantum field ricocheted through educated communities.
The "Age of Aquarius" became a central theme in the counterculture and hippie movement of the 1960s. Although not scientifically proven, idea that humanity was entering a new era of spiritual consciousness and social progress resonated with the values of peace, love, and equality.
Without LSD, Francis Crick may have never envisioned the double helix that won him the nobel prize.
The quantum field is so revolutionary because it suggests that matter is only potentiality until it is observed or measured.
It suggests there is an essence of unknowability in the fabric of reality.
Potentiality.
How far can we take this idea and apply it to our everyday lives?
“The state of man's mind, or the elementary phase of mind which he so far possesses, conforms precisely to the state of the world as he so far views it”
― Hegel
Star-wars would have us believe that we only need to “believe” in order to have power over reality. The question is not believing that you should think outside the box. The question is how.
How to alter your attention, change your perspective and alter what's important or real?
We are always trying to discern correlational patterns with causal patterns for survival.
Two friends of mine both amusingly share the same worldview. One is a pro-vax accountant and the other is an anti-vax conspiracy theorist. Both told me separately that if they cannot measure something concretely, they do not believe it exists.
Our cognitive machinery is a double-edged sword.
“I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology - makes me not see what I'm effectively eating. It's not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament - when we are within ideology, is that - when we think that we escape it into our dreams - at that point we are within ideology.”
- Slavoj Zizek
But how do we break out of the matrix, man?
The Matrix is a modern retelling of Plato's Cave Allegory.
Neo, is living in a simulated reality created by intelligent machines to keep humanity in a state of unconsciousness. Like the prisoners in Plato's cave, the people living in the Matrix only know the simulated reality and they believe that this simulation is the only true reality.
Neo’s journey from the simulated world of the Matrix to the true reality is a metaphor for the individual's journey towards enlightenment and understanding. Neo’s name embodies the idea of a new way of thinking and seeing the world.
Both the Cave Allegory and The Matrix explore the concept of reality and suggest that our perceptions of reality may not be accurate. Questioning the nature of reality and whether we can trust our senses to accurately represent the world around us.
Do you trust your intuition? How do we discern between our perceived and actual reality?
Pythagoras applied shamanic traditions to literacy and realised octaves in music and theorems comprehending patterns of nature into mathematical formulas.
Yet the same machinery that gives us the ability to see new patterns can blind us to reality.
Under the rule of Adoft Hitler many Nazi’s appreciated Buddhism. Heinrich Himmler carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita with him.
Wiki calls it the most revered of all Hindu texts.
The buddhist state of nirvana in a way aims at the extinction of the ego. It suited the national socialism of The Third Reich which required a dissolution of self into the Volksgemeinschaft, the "people's community".
The idea of karma was weaponized to justify the systematic persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. Karma was interpreted to explain oppression retroactively by suggesting that innocent victims do not exist.
“What kind of terrible things did they do in their past lives to receive this abuse?”
In modern logic it is preposterous to believe that this catastrophe is merely retribution of divine justice. Even buddhism, a religion dedicated to the art of relieving suffering, can be used to fully justify it.
It's not a hardware problem.
It is our process to differentiate correlation from causality.
When we examine soft skills we must look at how we interpret information subjectively. This quaint window is a portal where we can peer into the depths of ourselves.
Soft-skills are intrinsically linked to our subjective perception of reality.
Today these skills are often spoken of as separate entities, yet are different yet interrelated aspects of professional lives.
Quantum Skills
Lets picture skills as pure light.
Hard-skills are like particles. As classical science explains the behaviour of macroscopic systems, hard skills provide the technical foundation for interacting with an occupation.
You can measure them with standardised tests with repeatable results. They’re measurable exactly because they come into contact with a surface.
Without a test or surface to measure this light, it has the potential to be here or there. You don't know where it is.
It can only be measured in probability. In a sense they can only exist in a lab environment where all the variables can be controlled for quantitative measurement.
A quantum field is needed to fully understand the behaviour of the whole system.
Soft-skills are the waves. These skills are illusive and draw upon a range of cognitive and perceptive abilities that are difficult to quantify in abstraction.
Like waves of light, soft-skills exist probabilistically. They are the undefined potentiality without measurable form.
Persuasion, adaptability, leadership.
One cannot be held in abstraction, these skills each affect the other. They holistically use the perceptive parts of our cognitive machinery. We solve the sudoku of life every day unconsciously.
Just as light can be described by classical physics as a wave of electromagnetic energy or by quantum mechanics as a stream of photons, hard and soft skills work together to give a complete picture of an employee's abilities.
Both sets of skills are necessary for success in any field, and one cannot be substituted for the other.
Hard-skills may be classic, but soft-skills are quantum.
Key Takeaways?
It would be convenient to leave you with a simple recipe. Yet..
Its not that simple.
At some point in the future we’ll be patching our skill deficiencies like nicotine.
Until then, I invite you to join me on a journey.
Fin.