They’re all shapes of skill-sets!
One of my biggest challenges as a Generalist—with breadth and depth in multiple disciplines—is communicating Value.
I’ve received feedback that how I communicate breadth leaves people impressed, overwhelmed, and lost in all the different disciplines and foci I’ve worked in. When I go into depth, it’s either not the right moment or too much for what they were expecting.
How does one communicate skill-set succinctly in this situation?
Enter: skill shapes.
I-shaped, T-shaped, π-shaped
The typographic forms of the majuscules and symbol are where the names for these skills come from:
- I-shaped skill sets have a narrow, deep, singular knowledge in a specialized area
- T-shaped skill sets have a breadth of skills, deep into one skill
- π-shaped skill sets have a breadth of skills, deep into two skills
Each of the shapes are relatively easy to communicate and understand. Using this framing, it becomes a bit easier to identify ways to communicate skills.
- Q: What are your strengths?
- A: I’ve worked across {breadth} and am specialized in {skill #1}, {skill #2}…wait…
Something’s missing.
The metaphor’s quickly limited by their Names.
M-shaped, F-shaped, W-shaped, E-shaped
There are more characters that may be able to be used to communicate a similar metaphor. At least in the Latin alphabet, I see some possibilities. More depending if its “allowed” to rotate the character to force the metaphor to fit.
So, even if trying to continue the pattern, it would quickly fall short because of the limited number of capital letters and their relationship with a typographic baseline.
Bridge Interactive wrote about their own identified skill-sets—creating their own B-shape—and created some good E-shaped and X-shaped categories.
- E-shaped – They are the best practitioners in a specialised field because of experience, exploration, expertise, and execution abilities.
- X-shaped – These are self-actualised individuals who focus on solving social problems in their areas of specialised expertise.1
Yet, they’re still limiting in what can be done by the typographic figure-ground.
Comb-shaped spiky skill-set
This is the bit I discovered today—while following the rabbit warren of interesting links after subscribing to Generalist.World’s newsletter. The trail was: welcome email → click links → click links in one of the links → discovery.
I was introduced to the concept by Ross Dawson’s post: building success in the future of work.
...there is the potential for us to develop what we might call “Comb-shaped” skills, in which we have many specific domains of expertise as well as breadth. In this case we can certainly never match the knowledge of a deep specialist in any one area.
However in an increasingly complex, interconnected and interdependent world, if we have sufficient depth in several – or even many – domains, we can often be more valuable than a specialist.2
A quick look around the internet found it’s not too terribly of an uncommon idea. To me, that means, people will understand what’s being communicated wh
This metaphor allows the multiplicity of depth with a good breadth, and even allows some more playful metaphors too:
- All-purpose comb
- Wide-tooth comb
- Fine-tooth comb
- Pocket comb
- Barber comb
- Detangler comb
- Pick comb
- Rake comb
- Rat-tail comb
- Pin-tail comb
- Teasing comb
Each of these comb types have specific uses in how they work with teeth. From the generalist all-purpose comb that works has two different sets of teeth—detangling and details—to the pick comb, designed for a more vertical use to tease very thick or frizzy hair.3
With a more comb-shaped skill-set, and the generalist idea, this provides a strong metaphor that leads to the idea of “specialized generalists” that—if you’re self-aware of strengths, skills, and ways of deployment—you can name your specialization…even within the generalist paradigm.
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Metaphoric Method
This is an example of the metaphoric method in action.
Take a metaphor, go further with it, and see how it can expand the thinking through what you’re trying to communicate.
If I had the time and space, exploring and mapping each of those different comb-types to archetypal generalist categories & perspectives would be an extremely fun thing to do. Also: it has such potential in the “personality type” style market, but far more fun because you can individualize your own hair style and your comb.
Instant branding.
With meaning.
A new way to think about skill-sets
In this new framing, I think it gives some shape to stronger communication of skill-sets to potential clients, employers, and other humans in general.
I also think there’s a lot that could be done in the Skills Industry by exploring Typographic and Object shaped naming paradigms for skills.
Especially on our extremely diverse planet and Ways of Being human.