Kill skill, a design-driven approach to empowerment

Why is it important to talk about skills during these times?
What motivates people to grow and generate new behaviours?

Technology innovation, geopolitical uncertainty and the destruction of entire business models. These are issues that all organisations are addressing in order to strengthen their competitiveness or reinvent themselves. Continual transformation, necessary to keep up with change, translates to people who need new skills.

Often, however, the solution is limited to pre-packaged skill catalogues to be "installed" in the individual.

During our Kill Skill events, we introduced a change of perspective: skill lists lack personality as they ignore individual talents and business needs. Change without estimating the impact that it will have on the company-organisation, can lead to refusal, demotivation or a drop in productivity. 

“Organisations need to be supported on a deeper level. The training system must be hacked. An approach that rethinks innovation is needed. It is not just a technological theme, it must become a fixture to trigger new development models, able to react to changes and evolve.” 

Nicola Favini, General Manager of Logotel

To achieve this, it is increasingly important to amplify the level of understanding of the company-person system. Transformation programmes have already started, now we need to map how training strategies and change management initiatives impact people's skills.

“Neglecting factors such as management commitment, people's orientation and their needs creates a 'project killer', phenomena that demotivate people and destroy the desired results. We discussed this with management at the event, to give these killers a face. In our opinion this is the first step in neutralising them.” 

Jessica Aroni, Senior Manager Education Projects for Logotel

This is a collaborative activity to capture significant insights, fundamental in understanding whether the initiatives that aim at change are working or not.

With these premises as a starting point, Logotel proposes an approach that acts on the whole company-person system: from the formation of new skills to the environments that grow them over time, right up to the design of ways to thoroughly practise what people have learned.  

In a context in which a skill "ages" about every two years, it is necessary to plan paths and training tools and above all to enable each person to naturally apply what they have learned again. Training today must be closely connected with business and corporate culture. Without this condition, any training programme may not work. Any skill is really useful only if you build practice spaces for daily use, otherwise it evaporates.

To help skills become behaviours, we have identified four "activators" to give life to the projects, to make them concrete and measurable: attitude, motivation, permission and opportunity.

“In summary, activators must work together on our projects in selecting and developing people's attitudes; generating and maintaining motivation; granting permission to experiment with new behaviours and, finally, by offering opportunities to create a real impact of our initiatives.”

Maria Grazia Gasparoni, Manager of Education for Logotel

To grow this system, we need to act on three levels:

• Understanding: to map the company-person system with assessment tools, help organisations define the status of training initiatives and identify actions needed to bridge the gap 
• Enabling people: with development paths, tools and physical-digital environments to accompany people on the learning journey. Stimulating people's motivation and creating opportunities to transform skills into behaviours.
• Supporting behaviour on a long term basis, because these environments must be capable of stimulating and keeping the acquisition of new skills active.