Craft, Craftsmanship, Creativity and Co-creativity: The Perfect Four for Virtuous Competitiveness

Over time, either by education or experience, or a combination of both, everyone becomes good at something or the other. In a very broad generic sense, one becomes good at a craft. He or she becomes known by the craft he or she is good at. Again, at a very broad generic level, people get referred to as academicians, businessmen, scientists, engineers, accountants or moviemakers, for example. Needless to say, each generic craft is a combination of several specific crafts. Corporate leadership requires the craft of weaving together a tapestry of multiple crafts to create a business canvas one desires. There is an element of individuality as much as an element of collectivism in the craft. In some cases, it is sequential, like several baton passing individuals participating in a marathon. In most other cases, it is like a musical ensemble with a whole set of musicians working together, each excelling on his or her instrument. From a social activity, craft has moved to industrial enterprise, over time.     

The continuous optimization of value chain is the core of serving the customers continuously better. While an industrial value chain has several components, design (in the laboratory), manufacture (in the factory) and delivery (to the customer) of a product constitute the three essential components. These, as well as other components and sub-components of the value chain are typically carried out by people who are educated and trained to do so. The skill or the competency with which these activities are performed determines the overall capability of the value chain and, as a consequence, the competitive advantage of a firm. Two aspects are important from a generic point of view: the perfection with which the activity is performed and the creativity with which it is performed. This blog post proposes that the industrial value chain concept as above is just a part or reflection of how people can conduct their activities, individually or collectively, in day to day life.

Craft and creativity

Craft, by definition, is an activity involving a special skill at making things with one’s hands. Working with hands implies, without doubt, working with one’s mind also focused on the activity along with hands. Craft is never a singular skill; it covers all the skills needed for a particular activity. A potter, for example, is engaged in the craft of making pottery. His or her craft is not merely shaping the clay into the desired shape with his or her hands. His craft also includes conceptualizing the artifact he needs to shape, the type of clay that would be optimum, the selection of the right potter’s wheel, an understanding of the right oven and baking methodology and finally a capability to inspect and pass the final product (through sensory inspection!). This analogy is true of every domain or activity. An aircraft pilot needs to be adept not only at piloting and aircraft instrumentation but also appreciative of the overall integrity of an aircraft and its accessories and inputs; he needs to understand not only his route map but also several alternate routes. To summarize, every craft is verily a set of multiple skills, related and unrelated.

Craft is closely allied with creativity. A craft may seem to be ordinary and repetitive but each craft requires creativity perpetually. A potter may use the same clay, the same wheel and his own hands always. Whether the pottery is the same or different, the shaping of the artifact from the raw clay with his hands, mixed with requisite liquid content and rotated with appropriate speed and shaped with customized handling, requires perpetual creativity. The functional leader may face the same set of internal and external factors each day but the fact that there would always be surprise additions or deletions besides changes in amplitude of each factor requires him to create a customized solution each day. On a higher plane, however, most crafts are non-repetitive contextually, and require a different solution. Sports and arts, for example, represent the quentessial crafts that abound in creativity every moment. Industrial leaders and organizational professionals need to view their respective crafts as creative outcomes from trained hands and minds responding to unpredictable events.

Craftsmanship and co-creativity

A craftsman is a person who is not merely versed in his craft but is so well versed in his craft that he consistently creates a product that is invariably perfect and beautiful. An accomplished singer such as SP Balu or KJ Jesudas, a dexterous sand sculptor such as Sudarsan Pattnaik come to mind immediately when one thinks of craftsmanship. The craftsmanship of a craftsman is reflected by the quality of design and work of a product or service. The difference between a Japanese automobile and an indigenous automobile is, for example, one of the former displaying the highest levels of craftsmanship. Craftsmanship requires dedication and passion of the highest order to the craft, and perfect synchronization and synergy between the body and the mind. True craftsmanship, however, goes one step further, it fuses the body, mind, heart and soul in the work one does. Organizations must look at craftsmanship as opposed to craft as the essence of talent building.

We have considered earlier that every craft typically comprises several skills. More often than not, a broader craft like corporate management or moviemaking requires working together of many crafts and craftsmen. We have also considered that a craftsman needs to be creative. In an organizational setting, it would not be sufficient for individuals to be creative by themselves; they would need to be co-creative as a team. Let us take the example of a communications executive interviewing the chief executive for an interview for the company’s house magazine. The communications expert may come up with a creative questionnaire and the chief executive may come up with equally creative answers. If, however, both of them design and execute the entire activity with each other’s creative inputs working synergistically the impact would be profound. At a product level, automobile design and manufacture emerge as perfect examples of co-creativity. Also, called concurrent engineering, co-creativity helps the engineers develop vehicles that are lighter yet stronger, minimalist externally and maximal internally, more powered but higher in fuel efficiency, and so on.

The Perfect Four

Ideal organization design should be based on a clear delineation of all the requisite crafts. Just as a bill of material drills down the product through a hierarchy to the smallest individual components, organizational design requires a comprehensive and detailed bill of crafts. The next objective must be to develop each person to reach the highest levels of creativity and craftsmanship in the craft. Organizations which reflect craftsmanship stand differentiated from those which are mere assemblages of crafts. To be able to do that, organizations must abdicate the convenient paradigm of forced ranking and instead put in place the challenging paradigm of universal excellence. Allied with this is the need to facilitate and encourage creativity at individual level and co-creativity in team and at collective levels.

Co-creativity does not mean working together only within an organization or between organizations. Co-creativity also involves organizations working with markets, leaders working with governments, engineers working with customers, and so on. Co-creativity is boosted when each member of the team is able to perceive craftsmanship on the part of team members; it results in healthy respect for each other and a drive for collaborative competition. The beneficial results of the Perfect Four for the industry and society are self-evident. Quality in products or services would be synergistic with customer fulfillment and demand generation. Organizations would simultaneously be able to achieve mastery over time and cost as well. India has some examples of the Perfect Four of craft, craftsmanship, creativity and co-creativity producing some amazing results; such examples need to motivate a larger commitment to Perfect Four across the nation.

The cost of setting up an automobile facility in India, for example, is estimated to be one-third that of a comparable overseas automobile plant (even with certain imported equipment) and the time for setting it up (even on a ‘learn and execute’ basis) is estimated to be half that of an overseas plant build in advanced countries. This has been attributed to the Perfect Four working together in such cases.  India’s space program is an outstanding example of the Perfect Four. The latest launch of India’s Polar Launch Satellite Vehicle incorporating five satellites from different countries, including India, is an example of craftsmanship combining with co-creativity. The successful launch inspired Shri Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister tweet that the cost of India’s PLSV launch has been less than the cost of production of the Hollywood film Gravity! He has also held it to be a perfect example of his mantra of skill, scale and speed (source: PMO India on twitter). There is so much more to be achieved in India by Indian firms and Indian talent. It is time that organizations and individuals recall their historical capabilities in crafts, craftsmanship, creativity and co-creativity and lead on a new trajectory of global resurgence based on deployment of the Perfect Four.

Posted by Dr CB Rao on July 13, 2014                   

 

 

Hard Skills and Soft Skills: Differences Real or Unreal?

A manager’s competency set is expected to comprise both hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are those that reflect technical and analytical capabilities while soft skills are those that deal with communication and collaboration capabilities. A well-rounded manager should be adept in both hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills, which are technical and professional in nature, are predominantly acquired through education while the soft skills are predominantly personality based, and are improved through experience. Trainers typically tend to view these as two distinct streams of learning and development. Hard skills are rarely imparted in organizations except through on the job training. Each time an equipment or facility is upgraded or product and process specifications are bettered, experience of working with the changes teaches the employees new hard skills. On an exceptional basis, employees also are retooled through customized educational programs in universities.

On the other hand, experience which helps the employees upgrade their hard skills ironically very often leads to hardening of soft skills. Employees tend to become somewhat egoistic and rigid (depending on their cultural evolution) as well as authoritative or withdrawn (depending on whether they are extroverted or introverted respectively). Functions become rigid organizations within organizations, with growing inter-functional distances, making communication and collaboration exceedingly difficult, both at functional and individual levels. Given these cultural characteristics, the concentration of organizations tends to be on developing the soft skills of employees on one hand and changing the cultural dynamics of the organization on the other. Trainers and human resources managers generally concur that such programs usually have limited impact and fail to bring about fundamental and lasting improvements to employee soft skills or organizational cultural dynamics.

Hard versus soft; or hard with soft?

The distinction between hard skills and soft skills is real but the attempt to treat them as two distinct streams of continuing education is unreal. A person’s soft skills determine how open he or she is to improve his or her hard skills. Hard skills are not merely skills of engineering or accountancy that are robotically imparted. Hard skills also require significant person to person interaction to imbibe new skills. A person who is egoistic and rigid is more likely to be closed to asking questions and seeking knowledge than a humble and flexible person who is likely to be all eager and willing to learn new knowledge. More importantly, hard skills are likely to involve a host of technical and professional disciplines which need to work together to deliver the total systemic effectiveness. A manufacturing engineer, for example, would need to understand how his machine tools operate and fail, and how they are maintained. A maintenance engineer must understand why and how design and manufacturing tolerances are achieved. Clearly, interpersonal communication and collaboration, across technical functions, are vital to optimize the hard skill learning processes.

Equally, soft skills do not exist in vacuum. The soft skills of communication, collaboration, and time management, for example, may be required in teamwork for designing products, conducting operations, managing finances or developing markets. However, these goals themselves require hard skills. Without hard skills that lead to design creativity, manufacturing excellence, accounting integrity and market mapping these hard jobs cannot happen successfully. Possession of mere soft skills cannot lead to delivery of technical and functional jobs. Also, in addition, several of the soft skills require a measure of hard skills, be it language skills, computer skills or presentation skills, to be expressive, efficient and effective. It goes without further elaboration that hard skills and soft skills are integral to each other, and even symbiotic to each other. Organizations must find holistic paradigms to impart both the kinds of skills amongst the employees simultaneously.

Laying the foundations

In the Indian educational scenario, technical and professional educational stream is considered distinct from the language and fine arts educational stream. As one may surmise, the latter stream provides the foundations of soft skills. In technical and professional institutions, language courses are limited probably to just one semester and fine arts courses are virtually non-existent. As a result, students could be technically brilliant but tend to be lagging in terms of soft skills. As a converse phenomenon, arts and language courses have very few technical and professional subjects that could enhance the conceptual and analytical capabilities of a student. This differentiation is further accentuated by the fact that from the school going stage itself, the school children and their parents tend to zero in on their preferred careers and accordingly focus on the related subjects, and defocus on what they consider to be unrelated subjects. The foundations of basic education thus tend to be less than holistic, even if they are specialty oriented. Efforts by certain higher technological institutions such as the IITs to have one or two language or business communication and technical writing courses hardly provide complete alleviation.

Even in the job scenario, given that the emphasis of the organizations is on achieving immediate delivery from its employees, most training programs focus on adapting and updating the hard skills rather than on overcoming the deficiencies of soft skills. As a result, by the time someone reaches a managerial position some of the soft skills needed for getting effective delivery from others or effective collaboration with peer managers would be found to be missing, impacting organizational performance. Although organizations mount soft skills programs for middle level and senior level managers, such attempt would often be a case of “too little, and too late”. The problem is also accentuated by the “ego hurt” seniors feel when they are expected to develop the soft skills at a late stage, and the consequent defensive as well as aggressive reactions, making the desired culture of collaborative delivery even more elusive in an organization. Another negative consequence of this distinction is that technical specialists tend to get confined to line functions while non-technical people gravitate towards staff functions, making holistic leadership development to meet the requirements of apex positions even more challenging.

Easy to lose, difficult to acquire

The hard skills and soft skills are inversely correlated with learning and longevity. Hard skills are acquired in a relatively well-structured manner through the educational system but are easy to lose. As employees become accustomed to operate in established technological systems of firms, the gap between emerging technologies and established technologies widens leading to knowledge obsolescence. As the employees move up the hierarchy, ecosystems and management processes distance the employees from their machines, as a result of which they lose the hard skills relatively easily. The author’s observation is that employees tend to be technologically and professionally contemporary in the first one-third of their career span and later on experience a decline in their hard skills. The hard skills are easy to lose for employees who do not make special efforts to update themselves. There is no permanence at all in hard skills, and as certain organizations and certain employees encourage acquisition of soft skills, hard skills become easier to lose.

In contrast, soft skills are more difficult to acquire but once acquired tend to be more difficult to lose. Soft skills are acquired not merely through educational stream but more importantly through life experience itself. The propensity to acquire certain, if not all, soft skills is very much a personality related matter too, and in a sense tends to be a genetically influenced factor too. Depending on the congeniality levels that existed in family, school and college environments, a person could be positioned in terms of propensity to absorb soft skills. Interpersonal skills are experiential and once acquired are difficult to lose. While one does comes across instances of aggressive people mellowing or self-effacing people becoming more emphatic over a lifetime, basic changes in personality disposition are difficult to come by. While language skills may be easy to acquire equally by diverse people, the manner in which communication is conceptualized and delivered by each person would continue to be personality-specific. While people may be trained to adopt a particular style of interpersonal relationship, more often than not, adopted behaviors tend to wilt and natural behaviors are likely to surface under stressful circumstances.

C-suite requirements

The way hard skills and soft skills are taught in educational institutions, the manner in which they are imparted by family and social ecosystems and finally are updated by on-the-job experiences ironically run counter to the need to develop holistic business or corporate leadership. Like several of the managerial templates, the managerial grid which advocates that leaders should have more of strategic skills and less of technical skills, or put in a different way more of soft skills and less of hard skills, at leadership level is deficient. A music conductor, however eminent, he or she is cannot afford to forget how the notes are written. A surgeon, the more eminent he is the more skillful, the more technologically updated and the more behaviorally competent, he must be. The requirements of the corporate C suite are no different, and require holistic technologically and behaviorally competent leaders. The concept that with experience and hierarchical progression, the typical executive can afford to lose the hard skills and needs to be adept only at soft skills is ill placed.

The C-suite leader, the CXO of whatever domain or the CEO himself or herself, needs to keep the technical and professional competencies as strong and as updated they have been at the beginning of the career, and also have the appreciation of what soft skills can do to enhance the leadership. The educational approaches and the experiential strategies which make the hard skills easy to lose and soft skills difficult to acquire need a complete redefinition. If these development models are re-tuned to develop holistic students, holistic executives and holistic managers who are high on both hard skills and soft skills we would have a C-suite bench that is far larger and richer than what India, Inc has at present. The enriched C-suite would be a great leading factor in India’s quest for globalization. There would be a greater all-round entrepreneurial and big business development in the country and a greater emergence of Indian multinational corporations across the globe. It is time that Indian executives, managers and leaders who are strong on either of hard skills and soft skills appreciate the need to become equally strong on the other dimension.

Posted by Dr CB Rao on May 6, 2012