• Update

When I was creating my alternative CV I thought about what skills might be useful to emphasise and thought that learning, reasoning, awareness, lateral thinking were all useful things to try and demonstrate. The thinking behind this was that all these skills allow one to quickly pick up more skills as you go along.

You might compare this with having the ability to master the use of new tools quickly. This means that as you go along performing tasks you don't have to have used the right tool before, you just need to be able to select the right tool and learn to use it quickly.

This could be termed just-in-time learning, but being able to do this is a special set of skills in its own right, hence the term meta-skills. As ever, when you think you have coined a phrase, google quickly disavows you of that notion, and there are a number of sites which use this term (show me!).

So, not the most earth shattering discovery of the year, then. However lets take a moment to examine what these meta-skills might be and more importantly what this tells us about meta-skills.

Some examples of meta-skills:

• ability to learn quickly
• ability to extract accurate and clear information from multiple or obscure sources
• asking the right questions in a structured way
• being able to understand the context of something
• practical reasoning / common sense - having a feel for what will work
• quickly developing a mental SWOT analysis of a situation
• quickly adapting to social context and expectations

All of these skills seem to have in common the ability to see behind a situation by seeing the commonality in all situations and thus being able to apply the same tricks and methods all the time.

Obviously meta-skills are not as simple as bearing in mind some basic rules when handling a situation with a client or meeting someone new. The real skill is in the application of these skills. You can see people who are very good at this changing mental gear with a new situation and somehow very quickly doing the right thing or asking the incisive question. The advantage that these people have is that they think in a meta way, that is they are always thinking what is behind this, how does it sit within its context. They would be the type of person who would ask a client why they wanted to do that rather than just accepting it and asking how they wanted to do that.

This is, in essence, a facet of systems thinking. One of the crucial points is seeing the connections behind things. One of the things that makes this much easier is knowing that everything is intimately connected and that thus connections can always be found if you approach the search in the right way.

Finding the right way and becoming successful at meta-approaches and thinking is a life-long quest, but the journey, I am learning, is fortunately entertaining.

UPDATE 14-OCT-03: At the User Experience 2003 conference last week Dave was fortunate to hear Stuart Card and Peter Pirolli from PARC speak on Information Foraging. All very interesting. One of their points was that the quantity of information was increasing. Not very special so far you say, but they had lots of very interesting supporting evidence.

For example, in around the year 2000 the amount of information stored globally per capita reached the capacity of the human long-term memory. Since then it has continued to expand exponentially, whilst our memories retain the same capacity. By 2010 they estimate that there will be 80 000 Megabits of information stored for every living being on the planet. This is 80 times our long-term memory capacity.

Now this obviously set up their talk on information foraging very well, but it also got me to thinking how much more important meta-skills would be in this new world. There was a time when universities didn't offer different courses, because their one degree was to impart the sum of knowledge at that point. Then the quantity of information stored exceeded that which one individual could hold and so specialisation became the only path. Now in this new world, the entire human race cannot memorise all information stored, and are becoming less capable of doing so at a very fast rate. In a world where it is no longer possible for humans to even know everything, is there any point in trying to remember things, I thought?

I mean imagine that as well as teaching facts in school we taught (for example) techniques of optimal information foraging, speed reading, swift analysis models, diagramming, systems thinking and philosophy. The need for memory would be drastically reduced because people would be able to quickly obtain the required information on the fly.

The clincher for me was when they said: "With a decent search system you can obtain a sense of the contents of a million pages in 15 minutes". Wow!