In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Mike Borruso chats with Matt Beane, assistant professor in the technology management program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Beane discusses his book, The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines (Harper Business/HarperCollins Publishers, Spring 2024), which highlights the importance of human-centered learning and skill building in the digital age. Beane identifies the core components of the skill code and reveals why the future of work depends on the expert–novice relationships that inspire meaning and purpose. An edited version of the conversation follows, and you can also watch the full video at the end of this page.
Why are you so interested in how people develop skills?
I open the book by saying that since childhood, I have always loved watching experts work with novices and observing how that relationship unfolds.
As a kid, I took mandatory field trips to Sturbridge Village, which is a re-creation of a colonial village in western Massachusetts. No matter the occasion—from being a cooper to making barrels, dying fabric, and tinsmithing—I was there watching those [expert–novice] relationships unfold.
Both my parents were educators, so the theory and research about education and skill building was a constant topic of conversation in the house. As a result, it became an intellectual object of curiosity in my early teens. After leaving undergrad, I moved into the world of work quickly and realized that skill development and learning are more important, relevant, and difficult in the world of work than they are in school.
School, as it is generally in the United States, is not ideal preparation for skill building in the workforce.
Why is apprenticeship better than school for building skills?
Skill is the ability to produce results reliably while under pressure. This requires practice in real-world conditions. Ideally, practice is more effective when you do it in an apprenticeship-style interaction. This work is frequently taken for granted. Now work is much more granular. There are many more roles, distinctions, and information flows. You must have a lot more formal training.
However, building the capability to get results under pressure remains unambiguous. If you observe the research, this happens through bandwidth—high-contact, high-frequency interaction between experts and novices as they collaborate.
There’s an important, critical relationship between formal learning, abstract knowledge, and that type of skill building referred to as “procedural knowledge.” Yet skill is probably a better name.
What is the skill code that you talk about in the book?
The impetus for the skill code I refer to and write about in the book came from the realization that I was finding people who were building advanced skills very rapidly, in spite of new technologically infused barriers to skill building.
These people—across more than 30 occupations and types of technology—are all fighting to protect the same set of conditions in the work that allowed them to build skill. I looked across all these contexts and found that three things—challenge, complexity, and connection—were the three letters of the alphabet for how one builds skill.
How does technology interfere with the skill code?
Again, the skill code in the book refers to three components.
- Challenge refers to being pushed close to—but not at, up to, or beyond—one’s level of current capability.
- Complexity refers to understanding the complexity of your work system in a way that suits your interests. We often think of skill development as getting good at a focal task, and that is definitely part of skill development. Most of the research on skill development is based on focal tasks, when, in fact, the healthy journey to skill development involves also looking left, right, up, and down.
- Connection refers to bonds of trust and respect. The literature is very clear that the mutual bond of trust and respect that is forged between an expert and a novice is integral to how we build skill.
Regarding the interference of technology on these three components, the mechanism that has appeared across studies of more than 30 contexts shows intelligent technologies, like robotics and AI, allow a single expert to do more with less help. The presence of this sort of “novice optional” situation was one of my core findings. In some cases, it completely deprives a novice of any challenge.
Regarding connection, if people don’t even get a chance to play, they will not be able to ask intelligent questions that show they are trying to learn. They will not be able to pause and request coaching or guidance. This creates less of a chance for you to arrive poorly prepared and to struggle. Instantly, your credibility and the trust an expert has in you is reduced significantly. It is very hard to recover from that loss, in terms of the trust and the bond that you have with that expert and in that person’s willingness and ability to support you and to secure your next opportunity.
Across the board, when the novice optional scenario presents itself, we take that deal in exchange for short-run productivity. Doing this causes the three elements of the skill code to take a hit.
If technology hinders apprenticeship, the novice doesn’t learn. What does the expert lose?
At the very least, experts lose the opportunity to help cultivate in the next talent generation what they themselves were so fortunate to receive. There isn’t good research on the consequence of this for experts.
I’ve conducted research, but more is needed. I published research with a collaborator, Callen Anthony [assistant professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business], on this over a year ago regarding inverted apprenticeships. One consequence is that, ironically, you are stymied when it is time to learn about the next new wave of technology.
If you’re an expert, you’re booked on complex problems most of the time. Those are high-visibility, high-consequence problems. You’re not supposed to be learning anymore.
From a status point of view, you need to appear as if you are the expert in the room. That’s what gives clients the strength and confidence to put their problems in your hands. But you also don’t have the calendar time to devote to significant training. In general, that puts you in a challenging position to adjust the next time there’s a disruptive technology that surfaces in your profession. Ironically, one of the groups that is best positioned to learn is novices.
If you sever that connection, you have less of an opportunity for what Callen and I refer to as a fruitful inverted apprenticeship. Essentially, you continue to do the work and have novices involved. If you do it properly, you end up absorbing from them and learning about new technology just as they learn from you about what it is to be an expert banker, beat cop, welder, etcetera.
There’s a sense of esteem and respect in helping others build capability, thrive, and even exceed your capability. That’s part of the meaning of a life well lived.
That is one key loss. But the other loss is the one I alluded to earlier. Part of the reason we build skill in the first place and try to do work is the meaning that flows through the bonds of trust and respect that undergird the work.
That tinsmith that I used to watch as a kid wanted to work with the apprentice because it feels right and proper to help that next generation build capability. There’s a sense of esteem and respect in helping others build capability, thrive, and even exceed your capability. That’s part of the meaning of a life well lived. Certainly, in the research on motivation, learning, and skill development, experts need that sense of helping to cultivate the next generation in order to continue to have a sense of purpose in their work.
You also talk about three Ds in relation to the skill code.
The three Ds—discover, develop, and deploy—allow for a reasonable, context-agnostic recipe for how to go about figuring out how the skill code is relevant in your setting and putting it to work.
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Discover represents, in some ways, the critical part of the logic of understanding the skill code’s relevance. Many books contain a one-size-fits-all recipe that presumes a local variation in your context, profession, occupation, or technology.
Even if somehow it were exhaustively discovered, it always plays out differently given different professions, occupations, organizations, institutions, and industries. It’s incumbent on everyone who’s trying to be a steward of skill to ask, “Where are challenge, complexity, and connection healthy in my organization? Where are they not healthy? What is working well, and why? And how could we scale that elsewhere?”
It’s incumbent on everyone who’s trying to be a steward of skill to ask, ‘Where are challenge, complexity, and connection healthy in my organization?’
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Develop represents putting that basic localized, contextualized understanding to work and devising a sensible framework for your situation. This is not just germane to a local manager or a worker in an organization. This is also applicable to a technologist, to someone who’s building the very technologies that are part of the problem. There are ways of reconstituting those technologies to avoid the problem of cutting the novice out of the action. In fact, you could have it do the opposite.
Here’s an example regarding bomb disposal. In old approaches to bomb disposal, the person dealing with the IED [improvised explosive device] had to walk a few hundred meters away from the apprentice, which made it difficult for that apprentice to learn from the expert due to that distance. Reconstituting that technology and adding a robot in the loop, the apprentice can control the robot with the mentor standing right there. With both the apprentice and the expert together in a bomb-proof truck 300 meters away from the IED, it becomes much, much easier for that person to learn. Thus, technologists can take an active role in developing new strategies to extract productivity gains and skill development simultaneously. Developing new approaches that aim for both outcomes is critical.
- Deploy refers to the hard work of implementation. Management science and research relate to execution in an organized setting. How you create beneficial change is based on the outcome of incorporating those first two Ds. At that point, a leader or even an individual, in a certain context, will be much better equipped to take strategic action that doesn’t lead to unintended side effects in that third D.
How can leaders help improve the relationship between technology and human skill development?
The daily mantra for a senior leader at this moment should be, “How can we get our productivity up and enhance human skill in the same move?” You can ask that question of yourself and your team. You can ask that question of a worker, or of a professional body that works inside your organization or is connected to it. You can ask that of the vendors that supply the technology and infrastructure that you will rely on and operate.
That persistent, annoying visionary question is going to help you better decide the cases where it makes sense to go straight for productivity.
Human resources, learning and development, and talent development have a complementary role to play in any organization of appreciable size.
Redeploying people to more interesting or different kinds of jobs may be the outcome you think of first, but it should be thought of last. The first question is determining what you can do to the user interface, user experience—the core tech itself—so that at the end of every user session, average workers in your organization can receive output and improve their skill. This includes enhancing meaningful human connection, the bonds of trust and respect. This refers not just to building my skill in an isolated digital space in my remote-working office. Rather, it refers to the possibility that your technology could improve my productivity and help to rebuild the social fabric that we’re all disadvantaged from losing.
That is most definitely possible in a far wider variety of settings and scenarios than we’re probably even considering. A good leader will be very forceful about asking that question. Human resources, learning and development, and talent development have a complementary role to play in any organization of appreciable size. They can be partners to a leader trying to rework the fabric of an organization’s operations so that both goals are maximized. If we don’t try, we will sacrifice the midterm capability of an organization or an occupation at the expense of the productivity we immediately get from using these tools.
Watch the full interview
