A D[ie]str[au]ctive Power of a Hard Skills/Soft Skills Binary
Almost half a century ago the US Military offered a unique view on the definition of soft skills
Sometimes I am excited to realize that some of my previously held knowledge has been flawed. After-all, learning is not a mere amalgamation of information, it is also that uncomfortable feeling (referred to as cognitive dissonance) of questioning and restructuring our deeply-rooted cognitive schema of knowledge, assumptions, and beliefs.
When having come across the notion of “soft skills,” I first turned to Wikipedia to get a cheat sheet understanding on the history of the term “soft skills.” Why are they referred to as “soft”? What is the meaning of “soft” in the context of skills and competencies? I found that the term we use so commonly in Higher Education and workforce development, was brought to light by the US Army in the the late 1960’s — early 1970’s.
One of the excerpts that Wikipedia article quotes, made me huff and puff (having been in academic environment for quite a while, I have learned how to huff those puffs of disdain). And the quote is
“those job functions about which we know a good deal are hard skills and those about which we know very little are soft skills."
“What a negligent approach to defining soft skills,” I mumbled to myself.
The negligence, however, was all mine, or my superficial approach to building an understanding merely by relying on a few excerpts from a secondary source. I carried this faulty notion of the US Army’s definition long enough and even brought up this quote a couple of times to demonstrate a historically rudimentary approach to a complex notion of skills classification.
Soft skills discussions have been causing a lot of commotion: they are not easily defined; there is no consensus on what constitutes soft skills, and we are quite bothered by the implication of “softness” when it comes to skills like communication, leadership, critical thinking (as we frequently use these skills to exemplify soft skills). Dissatisfactions with the term “soft skills” have prompted new terms, such as human skills, foundational skills, people skills. Seth Godin made a compelling case for discontinuing the use of “soft skills” and instead referring to them as real skills.
The image below (generated via Google Trends) demonstrates an increasing interest in understanding “soft skills,” with all times high in September 2020. Searches for alternative terms are also evident and persistent, but for now none of the alternatives are showing real signs of being able to substitute the original “soft skills” term.
I agree with many sentiments, concerns, and criticism expressed on the continued application of the term “soft skills.” And in my own mind, I have yet another suggestion on terminology that I would add to the list. Nevertheless, instead of dusting off this term with disdain, let’s take a closer look into its origin.
Below is a brief review of the original records from the CONARC Soft Skills Training Conference held at Fort Bliss, Texas, in December 1972. We will not be delving into a comprehensive analytical discussion of the entire 340 page document; rather, we will address a number of key points that may be of value to educators and employers alike in our quest for understanding the notion of skills that for now we refer to as “soft skills.”
From Soft/Hard Binaries to Degrees of Unpredictability
Conference records demonstrate that whereas there was a need to identify a concrete definition of soft skills and highlight a clear distinction between soft and hard skills, many presentations addressed skills as a part of a continuum, instead of a binary. This continuum, in turn, was addressed in the context of three dimensions:
- “Degree of interaction with a machine.” The first dimension ranges from direct physical interaction with particular equipment to problem solving that involves knowledge of a machine but necessitates abstract manipulation of ideas regarding its application.
- “Degree of specificity of the behavior, action, or process to be performed.” This dimension spans from a set of skills needed to perform a single task that is driven by a simple process (the example they give is changing oil in a specific type of a vehicle) to the other extreme where there are multiple ways (behaviors, actions, processes) to carry out tasks, such as “motivate or lead troops, whenever and wherever the situation calls for it.”
- “Typical kind of on-the-job situation.” The third dimension refers to a set of skills needed to perform a task under predictable stable circumstances vs. functioning in unpredictable, unknown, and unstable environments.
If we simplify three dimensions of the continuum into a hard/soft skills binary (with each representing an extreme end of the continuum), we can define hard skills as ability to physically operate a concrete piece of equipment by way of following a prescriptive process within predictable circumstances; and soft skills as ability to operate with abstract knowledge, in the context of multiple variables (be it behaviors, actions, or processes) and unpredictable circumstances. Let’s reduce the binary even more, and we have a concrete/non-concrete binary. Concrete is synonymous with “hard,” thus we get “hard skills.” And soft is an opposite of hard, and we get “soft skills.”
Interestingly, if we exclude the terms soft and hard skills, it looks like we are talking about skills that are common for a novice vs. an expert. When we are just learning about a new field, our knowledge is very concrete and situational — we are not yet able to participate in complex decision making which involves multiple skills, multiple variables, and unpredictable circumstances.
Let’s go back to the excerpt I referred to in the beginning of the article:“those job functions about which we know a good deal are hard skills and those about which we know very little are soft skills.” I still think this sentence sounds misleading but it makes more sense now that we have looked at it in the context of the larger discussion.
As a result of these discussions, conference participants agreed that terms “‘Soft Skill’ and ‘Hard Skill’ be deemphasized or discontinued.” So, there we go, half a century later we are still bothered (including myself) with the terms popularized by the US Army during the conference, when the outcomes of the conference concluded not to emphasize these terms and instead concentrate on the complexity of environments within which skills have to be applied.
Further discussions during the conference emphasized skills development in the context of systems engineering: whether we are talking about system as a machinery or system as an organization.
“A manager is seen as the controller of a system. This system can be at any level of complexity — from one person with one task to many people with many complex function.”
And here is an interesting serendipity. Systems engineering has a duality of so-called functional system requirements (what the system does) and non-functional system requirements (how the system performs). Non-functional system requirements are system quality attributes, such as adaptability, agility, etc (also referred to as ilities). Furthermore, another referent for non-functional system requirements (or ilities) is “soft intents.” For a system to survive in unpredictable, uncertain, changing environments, it has to have robust ilities (or “soft intents’). Rings the bell? Soft intents, soft skills. Both are a prerequisite for a system’s (machinery, organization, living organism) survival in the real world that is rarely predictable.
If I were to offer an alternative term for soft skills, I would suggest “ilities.” As this term is taking a stronger hold as an alternative to “non-functional system requirements” and “soft intents” in the fields of systems engineering, maybe one day ilities will be considered a stronger description of skills that we can bring to ensure organizational success and integrity.
