Softly, softly…

I’d like to talk about being ‘human’.

Humans are emotional lumps of goop. Yes, we can be rational, analytical and detached when we need to be, but fundamentally we are ruled by a furious cocktail of signals that emanate from either our heart or our head.

We love people who don’t necessarily fit our expectations, we laugh at stuff that we shouldn’t, we know what is right but we do what is wrong because we are tired or lazy or think no-one is watching. We are a constant whirlwind of contradictions led – in the main – by our emotional gremlins. It’s not wrong – it’s human.

If we were entirely rational, we would be robots. If we were entirely emotional we would be feral. The beauty of humanity and as humans is our inate flip flop and turbulence between our emotional and rationale brains. Left and right. Ying and yang.

A question I tend to ask at posh, shiny conferences to get people to step outside the norms of defining people as ‘consumers’ or ‘customers’ and to think about humanity and behaviour is…

“Are you a scruncher or a folder?”

There’s no better question to bring an audience down to a baseline and get them to think about everyone as a human being. Judges, police, teachers, the King himself. They are either a scruncher or a folder.

I’ll leave you to process that for a second.

There is often very little logic at play when we make decisions. We trust our gut. We lead with our hearts. We soul search.

So that’s humanity in a nutshell.

Let’s park that thought for a second.

Now I want to talk about education…

For the bulk of our education, we are taught to be ‘excellent’. And by excellence I mean individual-ist and attain-ist…always striving for the top grade, the fastest lap, the highest mark. We are conditioned from an incredibly early age to seek the top, and we do that by achieving things by ourselves and using our own hard-learned skills. Yes, there’s often a ‘group project’ or a ‘collaboration’ but ultimately we seek to bob to the top of the group at the expense of the rest. Our parents reward us for doing ‘well’. Schools and institutions reward us for doing ‘well’. We sub-consciously isolate ourselves from others in our endeavours, purely because of the promotion of individualism and excellence that we are exposed to.

Now there’s nothing wrong with wanting to succeed and be the best at what we do. You could say that is hard wired into our psyches from the early days of human evolution.

But the way we are ‘groomed’ by our educational establishments is to develop a range of skills that we duly list on our CV’s that identify our value to business. We are measured by our degree result, our awards, our grades, our certificates, our aptitude with software, our sporting achievements.


So let’s talk about business…

We effectively compare ourselves with our rosettes and points to others with their own set of rosettes and points and we try to work out how to ‘win’. How to get the job. How to be first. How to ‘succeed’.

This isn’t really going to change. As long as there is HR and – dare I say it – AI, candidates are always going to be initially compared by these measures. It’s not right but businesses need ‘ways’ and ‘processes’ to manage tasks. This is one of them. Quantifying potential ‘value’ of a human to a business. Summarise your life into an easily digestible list and let us judge you!

The hard skills. The stuff you can show, measure, and be ‘better’ on paper. Typically the things that we do that we can ‘score’ and demonstrate measurable excellence in.

So we have an inherent tension. Between our human nature and the way ‘business’ sees us. The way education grooms us to become ‘professionals’.

Unfortunately, most of the traditional messaging for business success predicates itself on these measures. It’s still about being the most powerful, the most influential, the one with the greatest attainments.

But I want to talk to you about the flip side.

The fuzzy, intangible, fluffy bit of what you need to do to ‘succeed’.

Rather uninspiringly, they are called soft skills.

The skills that will – without a doubt – facilitate your future professional success in ways that hard skills will never be able to do.

Let me illustrate this with a chance question posed to us by our lecturers while at Uni. I was studying ‘industrial design’ and the lecturer asked “Who thinks they will go on to work in a design consultancy?”



A sea of hands went up, but mine didn’t. I looked at my peers and made a judgement as to whether my ‘skills’ (and by that read hard skills) bore scrutiny against theirs. I assumed that because I wasn’t the best designer, the best modelmaker, the best engineer, the best at CAD that I wouldn’t stand a chance of getting a job in a ‘consultancy’. Consultancies (or agencies) were the pinnacle of my craft. Where the brilliant people went to ride cool bikes, drink cold beer and laugh at cool design jokes. At best I figured I would get a job in an engineering design department within a business somewhere, gradually honing my hard skills and slowly work my way up that way….

It wasn’t about confidence per se although I will admit that I wasn’t as confident as I could have been. Or arrogance. It was educational conditioning that meant I mentally ‘totted up’ my hard skills in my head and made a judgement that they didn’t add up to enough ‘points’ to get me into those hallowed grounds.

Jump forward a few years. I’ve graduated. I’ve gone back to work for the business that sponsored me throughout my final year. Nothing special. In hindsight it was the early stages on me harnessing my soft skills but that’s another story.

My boss went away on a sales trip to the US for a fortnight. I decided to reprint my business cards with ‘Director of Product Development’ on them or something similar. I then went to a trade show and managed to distribute aforementioned cards amongst the consultancy elite.

Long story short, I managed to get an interview with one of them and ended up getting a job as a junior designer but wrongly thought that it was on the basis of my ‘hard skills’. For sure I needed to demonstrate my ability to do the practical bits of the job through my previous work, but looking back I now know that it was predominantly my soft skills that secured me that first job. My ability to hold a conversation. My ability to make my future bosses feel at ease. My ability to explain ‘how’ I did stuff…not necessarily what I did.

It was also my soft skills that opened up opportunities. When you are a junior designer you tend not to work on stuff by yourself. You are tasked and you work alongside a senior or a director. But when I went into client meetings I found myself absolutely wading into conversations with the client and asking question after question after question. Getting to know them. Understanding how to make them believe in me. Figuring out what makes them tick so I can use that to my creative advantage. It was such a phase of realisation for me. That I could be a designer in a top notch creative business and do better than my peers who – on paper – were leagues ahead of me in terms of hard skills.

All that programming over the previous 18-20 years of education told me that I shouldn’t be here. But I was and I was thriving. Thriving because I had managed to tap into my soft skillset and deploy it with gusto and vigour. No messing about.

With the benefit of experience and hindsight, I can absolutely see why I have been hired by the people that have hired me. But at the time I thought it was my polished portfolio. My project delivery. My well-laid-out powerpoint presentations. Yes…but mainly no.

It was the soft stuff…

When I interview young graduates or juniors for a new design role, I’m really not interested in their degree result. I need to feel confident that they can do whatever I throw at them, which in part is hard skills related stuff. That’s a given. But a lot of it will be soft skills related stuff. Can I throw them into a meeting room with a new client and will they hold their own? Can I see them working well with more senior members of the team but still get their voice heard? Will they treat their juniors with respect and empathy? Can they work around a client disagreement with politeness and resolution? None of which has anything to do with their specific discipline around which they have developed and honed their hard skills.

You see, business is rarely the cold, besuited pantomime you see in leaflets or on TV. The reality is that it is a bunch of people trying to work alongside each other, trying to get along with each other and attempting to get the best out of the situation for themselves and for their clients, customers, bosses etc.

Humans. Emotional lumps of goop remember?

Think of a restaurant.

You think of food. Cuisine. Menus. You think of a physical location. Décor. Interior Design. You think of a brand name. Logos. Signage. These are things that ‘attract’ us to it. Make us decide to try it. The hard skills if you will.

But the thing that will keep you going back is the ambiance, the way the waiter or waitress greeted you when you arrived, the perfect amount of time they left you to decide what to eat but also giving you some great recommendations and making you feel comfortable all at the same time. The surprising little candle in your dessert because they caught you talking about a birthday. The note on the bill. The slightly fuller glass of wine because “Hey, we just finished off the bottle!” The fact that they treated your shy 11 year old daughter with respect and time. The laughter from the kitchen. The way they adapted a particular dish because you really don’t like cheese! All of that stuff. The stuff that makes us glow and smile. The emotional food that is driven by the irrational.

Fuzzy, lovely, soft stuff.