A recent article in The Atlantic used the USS Gabrielle Giffords to illustrate the important changes taking place in the US Navy, - and in the world of work in general. After discussing various features of its advanced design, the article noted that the ship’s most futuristic aspect is its crew. “It was designed to operate with a mere 40 souls on board - one-fifth the number aboard comparably sized legacy ships and a far cry from the 350 aboard a World War II destroyer. The small size of the crew means that each sailor must be like the ship itself: a jack of many trades and not, as 240 years of tradition have prescribed, a master of just one,” noted the article. Due to increasingly sophisticated technologies and the high cost of personnel, the USS Gabrielle Giffords is among a new class of Navy ships that’s turned away from specialists in favor of so-called hybrid sailors who are able to handle multiple tasks and rapidly acquire new skills.
The replacement of highly specialized workers with problem-solving generalists who are able to handle and quickly learn new tasks has been taking place across a wide variety of occupations and industries. Increased productivity and lower costs, i.e., doing more with less, are some of the reasons for this change. But, the increased complexity of products, applications and systems, and the unanticipated problems that often follow are other important reasons.
The concept of hybrid or T-shaped workers was first introduced around 25 years ago as a metaphor to describe the kind of individuals that the Navy and many other organizations are looking for. The vertical stroke in the letter T represents a depth of skills and expertise in one or more specific fields; the horizontal bar implies broad multidisciplinary and social skills, as well as the ability to collaborate with experts across disciplines to jointly solve complex problems.
T-shaped skills are increasingly valued in the marketplace. Business schools, for example, have been emphasizing the importance of skills that we generally associate with the liberal arts. Such a transformation of business education was pioneered by Roger Martin when he was Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto from 1998 to 2013. Achieving these objectives required business schools to move into territory “more traditionally associated with the liberal arts… students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions.”
In a 2015 HBR article, Ernest Wilson, - then Dean of USC’s Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, - wrote about his research to better understand the key competencies companies are looking for by asking business leaders around the world what attributes executives must have to succeed in today’s digital economy. The studies found that the traditional hard skills typically provided by engineering and business schools must be complemented with a set of so-called soft skills or attributes. Five such attributes were specifically identified: adaptability, cultural competence, 360-degree thinking, intellectual curiosity, and empathy.
Why are seemingly soft, broad skills so valued in today’s business environment? What’s wrong with I-shaped workers with strong individual skills? There are multiple answers to these questions. Hard skills tend to be deep but narrow. Their half-life is getting shorter. The more specific and concrete the skills, the more they are prone to be automated or significantly transformed by advanced technologies like AI, making it necessary for workers to be flexible enough to keep adapting to the continuing changes in the workplace.
Moreover, teamwork is increasingly important in our fast changing, complex world. If the members of a team all have strong individual skills, it’s often hard for them to collaborate, as they may each also have strong individual points of view. Effective collaboration requires a combination of social, communications and other soft skills that I-shaped workers may not quite have but T-shaped workers do.
“Minimal manning - and the evolution of the economy more generally - requires a different kind of worker, with not only different acquired skills but different inherent abilities,” notes The Atlantic article. Early on, the Navy knew that not everyone would be a suitable candidate for the kind of T-shaped, hybrid sailor they were seeking for the new generation of minimal-manning ships like the USS Gabrielle Giffords. So they commissioned studies to help them select and prepare crews for these new ships.
Zachary Hambrick, - a psychology professor at Michigan State University and director of its Science of Expertise Lab, - was one of the academics that the Navy worked with. Professor Hambrick devised a series of tests to try to understand how well naval candidates would perform in what are known as fluid-task environments. Instead of trying to identify how well a candidate has mastered fixed skills, as is generally the case with IQ and SAT tests, these tests measured a candidate’s ability to flexibly shift their attention between different tasks, a skill often required to address unanticipated complex problems.
According to Hambrick, fluid intelligence requires considerable raw processing brain power which generally peaks in our early 20s. It’s quite distinct from crystallized intelligence, the know-how and expertise which we accumulate over decades, which peaks in our 50s. In problem solving settings where know-how and expertise are trumped by the ability to quickly adapt to a new environment and learn new skills, fluid intelligence is paramount. In such fluid settings, candidates who score high on otherwise positive qualities like conscientiousness, perseverance or grit don’t do as well, because instead of adapting to the new environment, they keep tenaciously doing what they were doing, which impedes their performance. “They were the victims of their own dogged persistence.”
In stable environments, - such as mastering chess, tennis or piano, or getting good grades in school, - “a rigid adherence to routine can no doubt serve you well. But in situations with rapidly changing rules and roles, a small but growing body of evidence now suggests that it can leave you ill-equipped… Fluid, learning-intensive environments are going to require different traits than classical business environments… things like ability to learn quickly from mistakes, use of trial and error, and comfort with ambiguity.”
“The world of work is full of such surprises. And as the rules change, so do ideas about what makes a good worker.” We will increasingly want hybrid sailors in new ships, and T-shaped individuals in innovative, agile, continuously learning organizations.
Irving, your blog is an excellent, concise summary of both the history of the academic development, and enterprise adoption, of T skills. It communicates succinctly the the value to workers and their employers.
I've been fortunate to work as an advisor with Michigan Technological University since the beginning of 2016 and the founding of the Pavlis Honors College. This honors college was created to help all of the university's students to develop T skills, not just those with high GPAs. More than 80% of the university's students graduate with a degree in a STEM field. Now all of these students have the opportunity to develop the skills required for a fluid, learning intensive work environment.
https://www.mtu.edu/honors/about/welcome/
John
Posted by: John Soyring | November 25, 2019 at 09:20 AM