IQ, EQ and now PQ
PQ is going to be the next big thing in work psychology and management. What competencies do we need for participating, leading and influencing in today’s interconnected world?
Here is a list from Jane McGonigal, the games designer who talks of the engines of happiness. I’ve found links to her work here, here and here.
1 Mobbability
“- the ability to do real-time work in very large groups
– a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously”
Restated: My immediate thought is the ability to mobilize people for anything – a party, a demonstration, etc. This is a little more though. It probably begins with the ability to appreciate the dynamics of a music festival, or the crowd at a big sporting event. A Mexican Wave is one of the simplest forms
My questions: I get the feeling that I am missing something!
2 Ping quotient
“- measures your responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement
– your propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network”
Restated: How quickly do you respond to requests for your attention and participation? Do you plan your communication systems so that you are able to respond? Do you anticipate the types of inquiries you will receive and do you update your communication systems to reflect the inquiries you receive? Do you initiate contacts and broaden your network? How do people find you and how do you find them?
My questions: Where is listening?
3 Collaboration radar
“the ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task”
Restated: When you start a task, do you think about who can and will help you? Do you take an interest in what work other people like to do? Have you some kind of model in your head about how to collaborate with other people and what helps collaboration to be satisfactory or unsatisfactory?
My questions: Is this ability to engender collaboration? Or just detect it?
4 Influency
“- the ability to be persuasive in diverse social contexts and media spaces
– understanding that each work environment and collaboration space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique”
Restated: Are you persuasive and are you persuasive to different audiences and in different settings? Are you interested in persuasion and how other people are persuasive? Are you able to communicate through different channels? Do you understand the nuances of using different channels? Have you an emerging theory of when to use various techniques and why? Do you have some idea of what motivates other people in various settings? Are you curious about their motivation? Are interested in how motivation changes when we take part in groups? Can you predict what will individuals will do next in a social settings and what an entire group or community will do? Can you anticipate what individuals, groups and communities are willing to do?
My questions: The arts are so important, aren’t they?
5 Multicapitalism
“fluency in working with different capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, and financial”
Restated: How much capital do you need for your business to succeed? What do you have now? What do you need to do to
Financial?
Intellectual?
Social? Whuffie?
My questions: What is natural capital? Is social capital tradable? Is the “securitization” of social capital the next political innovation?
6 Protovation
“- fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles
– ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failure”
Restated: Do you “have a go” and look for feedback from other people? Do you pick small, cheap, easy ways to experiment with new things that don’t just lead to success but teach you something important when you fail? Do you learn the meaning of errors? Are they useful signals or just sources of distress? Do you celebrate the errors of others (and I don’t mean gloat!) so their experiences are seen as useful and valuable by everyone?
My questions: Has anyone linked protovation to self-efficacy (Bandura) and error-training (Michael Frese)?
7 Open authorship
“creating content for public consumption and modification”
Restated: Do you write, speak, make videos, etc. for other people? Do you expect them to take what you use and change it (mash it)? Do you judge your effectiveness by the extent to which your audience uses and changes your ideas?
My questions: Is this a major aspect of social media? That we expect our ideas to be an input rather than an output or expert opinion? Is expecting a reply rather than approval or disapproval the major behavioral shift of our time?
8 Signal/noise management
“filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from massively multiple streams of data”
Restated: Have you set up your data streams so that you receive information from many, many sources? Have you set up your data streams so that you can detect repetition (without checking our original sources), speculation, rumor? Are you interested in how information is passed around the world on matters that interest you? Do you streams allow you the benefit of serendipty? Have you got people (lots and lots) to consult when you are stuck?
My questions: How much have these skills changed from the checking of provenance taught in universities? How much can we transfer skills from one domain to another?
What have I still got to learn?
9 Longbroading
“thinking in terms of higher level systems, cycles, the big picture”
Restated: Having a “helicopter view” and seeing a problem from different perspectives have long been valued business skills. This seems to go further – to understand a situation in terms of its dynamics
My questions: If I am correct, then we need to see situations in terms of their feedback loops? And is this an important skill that kids learn when they work out different ways of playing a game?
10 Emergensight
“the ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity”
Spot unexpected patterns as they pop up, and be ready to take advantage of them – even when systems scale in size and messiness.
Restated: Do you look of for the way a pattern unfolds? Do you look for changes in speed as well – from the lull before the storm to the tempest that will blow itself out? Do you look for small levers that have huge impacts?
My questions: Is this improvisation? Are we talking about good reaction times, or understanding complex dynamics?
Hat-tip to NLabNetworks and Andrea Saveri of the Institute of the Future who spoke at the recent NLabNetworks meeting at Leicester.
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