The main goal of someone working in the technology space (or any knowledge worker to be fair) is value creation, either to the organization you are in or to the market. So I’ll explain how I’m currently thinking about it.
The framework
In my opinion, the process of value creation has the following stages:
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Step 1: Learning
Learning is food for our knowledge and skills, which are needed in the next 2 steps. There are many ways of doing it: formal education, experience, reading…
There are many things we can learn, but in this context, we will care about two groups: knowledge and skills.
Knowledge is the starting point, and by applying certain skills to it we’ll later get new knowledge or extract value out of knowledge.
Some interesting types of knowledge:
- Awareness of what you don’t know: will be important for further learning.
- Concepts and facts: these are premises for your analysis.
- Context: Understanding the current state of something and how we got there.
Types of skills:
- Analytical: allows you to conclude existing knowledge or information. There’s some kind of overlap here with soft and hard skills but I will separate it because they have a special purpose in the framework.
- Hard: are specific to a job or area of expertise. They usually take time to learn and are quite technical.
- Soft: will be very important when interacting with people. From working in a team, influencing the decisions of other people or selling what you can offer to others.
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Step 2: Generate new knowledge (or problem identifying)
Analyzing our current knowledge to get new one. I also consider identifying problems in the world or company as new knowledge.
This new knowledge can be later distilled into value.
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Step 3: Extract value out of the knowledge (or problem-solving)
There are two ways of doing it, which often can (and should) be combined:
- With hard skills to solve problems.
- With soft skills to leverage people.
Combining both will reach the biggest impact. Only sharing new knowledge is teaching, and solutions that don’t get consensus of other people don’t get very far or are solutions to small problems. But when you fix problems and get others to be excited about your solution and help it materialize you will be a force multiplier. The bigger the problems and the people helping materialize your vision the better.
How to use the framework
The framework above can help you assess your value creation process. Thinking of it as a streamlined process with clear steps can help you.
Also visualizing it in this way can help you identify your weak spots: you might be neglecting one of the steps which is acting as a bottleneck. Another possibility is that you can possess plenty of knowledge but few skills or vice versa.
The framework might need refinement and is not exhaustive on how any of the steps work. Each step is itself a whole discipline.
Fundamental skills for each step
There are many ways to approach the steps above and skills that are useful.
However, there are a few that are fundamental to each phase of the process and have been going on for millenials. Thus I think these skills are core to creating value:
- Reading: what you consume is food for your thinking. You need to consume enough quantity of good quality knowledge. With books, you can learn deeply about topics you are not well versed enough yet.
- Thinking: reflecting on some matter. It’s the simplest form of analysis and something we do all the time. Learning to think deeply will allow us to find novel insights that are useful to us and others.
- Writing: this is the most basic form of extracting value. Once some knowledge or a solution to a problem is written in a comprehensible way it can be useful to others.