SuperSkills at 3 Monkeys – some more thoughts and writing a second book

January 28, 2011

Early start today to talk about the SuperSkills idea, at 3 Monkeys Communications in Soho.

If you attended – thanks very much and here are the slides (which strictly speaking I should have posted beforehand). For more detailed notes about the detail of the talk, take a look at the post from TEDx last week.

Super skills at 3 monkeys

View more presentations from Antony Mayfield.

The main change from this presentation’s debut at TEDx Brighton last week was to add a little about the business or management context for thinking about SuperSkills. Moving on from some ways of describing this I’ve used in the past, I talked about analysing the impact of social web on a business across four areas, with the acronym LOOP:

Long term: What are the strategic implications of the web for the next 5 – 10 years. How will it affect the classic PEST elements (Political, Economic, Social and Technological) in the organisation’s environment.
Operational: Here and now in the next 12 months where can social/web tools support operations such as marketing, customer service, sales, research, product development, HR etc.
Organisation: How will different teams be able to work together on social web related projects? How will information and insights be communicated quickly around the company?
People: What are the issues that the social web raises for our people? The line between public and private is blurring,

The feedback from both this talk and the TEDx one has been very positive (please do let me know if you have any criticisms, constructive or otherwise) and I’m going to start developing some of the ideas in a book now. Watch this space for more new son that front.

The main things that people have been positive about (other than the Gotham font) are:

The idea of investing time in learning tools like Twitter, to develop literacy.
How effective the Pomodoro technique can be.
Thinking about social networks as productivity tools at work.
Developing different approaches to work habits and workflow.
The importance of always-on sharing

Thanks to everyone who has shared their thoughts on the subject – it ‘s really useful in working out how a book about this might work.

Antony Mayfield

Speaking, Superkskills

networks, prodiuctivity, social networks, superskills, twitter

5 responses to “SuperSkills at 3 Monkeys – some more thoughts and writing a second book”

Mark

January 28, 2011 at 11:56 am

Hey Antony,

I’d like to see skills (something you practice and get better at) supported by education (knowledge you can apply). An old post I wrote suggested the following as ‘new’ subjects that are very much of our information age…

Corporate history: the ‘hidden history’ of the rise of the corporation as an entity that affects all of our lives today.

Historical ecology: the study of the “two-way relationship between humans and their living environments”.

Network theory: looking at the complex networks that run through our lives, from the micro to macro levels.

… the reason being is that these skills you reference are all well and good but I despair at the received ideological framework in which most people apply them. The above topics start to break those conventions down.

http://markhigginson.com/is-never-a-waste
Antony Mayfield

February 2, 2011 at 3:50 pm

Thanks for the thought-provoking comment, Mark. Really intriguing ideas – I’d especially agree with the idea of teaching network theory.
Jeremy Head

February 3, 2011 at 3:08 pm

Hi Antony
The thing that kept coming back to me at TEDx when you were running through this was that to a degree we already had these skills – and we have allowed the shiny, excitable immediacy of the web to take them away.
Time management isn’t a new discipline. I was doing time management courses back in the dim days of email that only worked witin your own company. (Shows how old I am.)
It’s human I think to be reactive and to enjoy being a magpie – particularly if you have a vaguely creative side to your personality. But it’s not hard to be disciplined if you put your mind to it. Write a list every morning of the stuff you need to do today. And work through it. And give yourself a pat on the back if you finish (or get give yourself a bit of a kicking if you don’t)
There certainly are new techniques that we need to learn around working with these new web tools like twitter. But are they skills? I’m not totally convinced.
Cheers
Jeremy
Antony Mayfield

February 4, 2011 at 10:09 am

Thanks for the comment, Jeremy – it is really helpful to have some criticism. I delayed replying while I had a bit of a think about what you have said.

You’re right to give things like the definition of “skill” a prod and to remind us that buckling down and working through a to do list is nothing new.

I think, however, that working well within the context of online networks does require new skills or adapting and updating our skills to the demands and possibilities of the web. Obviously, though, I could do with working on how to make that clearer.
Mark

February 20, 2011 at 2:52 pm

Dug out from my delicious:

‘7 essential skills you didn’t learn in college’

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/09/ff_wiredu/