Even at an individual level, skills can be understood as systems of systems. Take the classic skill of riding a bicycle. This requires an elaborate system of monitoring, signal processing, feedback, and muscle response involving the body’s various proprioceptive and kinesthetic systems. Humans are highly adaptive and able to reconfigure around new challenges remarkably well. Once these systems form themselves around the task of bike-riding…then the riding becomes largely effortless.
It is the same in organisations. Organisational systems become optimised around certain tasks…managing certain types of risk, recognising certain types of opportunity, delivering certain outputs. These “skills” emerge from the power structures, technologies, information management etc. Once they form they become largely invisible unless there is some organisational memory of the preceding state (or they stop working). Unfortunately these systems may not be as adaptive as the human body.
My background is mostly in recruitment and talent acquisition. Very often I have worked on assignments where my client identified an organisational capability gap, and was looking to fill that gap by recruiting someone with the demonstrated ability to deliver that capability. Unfortunately this approach fails more than it succeeds because the capability is not found (only) in the individual, it is found in the system. The new hire’s capability cannot be actualised in the new environment because the system is not optimised to enable that.
This is where reductive models of skill, and the attribution of skills only to individuals, can really fall down. It is important to understand that skills are systems of systems…which means that individual skills must be considered in context. Just because you have people in your organisation who “have the skill” does not at all mean that the skill can be expressed in your organisational context.
And if you hire someone with bike-riding skills, make sure you give them a bike to ride.