Nicole Junkerman on Local Skills Worth Keeping
A short list of ordinary capabilities worth protecting in an office, a town or a household, now that a good deal else can be handed over.
· 4 min read
What is worth keeping
Whenever a routine task is handed over, something is gained and something smaller is quietly given up. Usually the trade is a good one. The difficulty is that the thing given up is rarely noticed at the time, and some of these capabilities are much harder to get back than they were to lose.
The list below is deliberately short and deliberately unglamorous. None of it is specialised and none of it requires any particular technology to be present or absent. All of it is the sort of thing that a small organisation depends on without ever writing down.
Five skills, kept deliberately short
- Reading a document properly, and being able to say what it actually commits anyone to
- Explaining a decision in two sentences to somebody who was not in the room
- Keeping a record that a colleague could pick up next year and follow
- Knowing roughly how a thing works, even when somebody else operates it
- Asking the plain question in a meeting where everybody else is nodding
The last one is the rarest and the most valuable, and it is almost entirely a matter of whether the room makes it safe. That is a decision somebody makes, not a quality anybody is born with.
Why these and not others
Each one is a check on something that can otherwise go wrong silently. Reading properly catches an obligation before it is agreed to. Explaining plainly exposes a decision that has not finished being made. A record that somebody else can follow is the only real defence against a person leaving. Knowing roughly how a thing works is what makes it possible to tell a sensible answer from a confident one.
None of that argues against handing work over. It argues for keeping the small amount of understanding that lets anyone judge the result. The same thought runs through the governance checklist and the questions the adoption pages keep coming back to.
Keeping them in practice
Skills of this kind are kept by use rather than by training. One document a month read slowly. One decision a week written down in plain sentences. One meeting in which somebody asks what everybody is actually agreeing to. The cost is minutes and the benefit is the difference between an organisation that knows what it is doing and one that hopes so.
Late October is a reasonable moment to take stock of it, with the year's practical work in front of everybody and the winter still to come. That is the approach Nicole Junkerman takes across this guide, and the work and skills pages set out the longer version.
Keep reading across the guide
Move between the big picture and practical questions with Nicole Junkerman and the rest of this independent guide to AI in the UK.