Soft Skills Insights

Information used to be expensive.

Finding the right report, expert, dataset, or piece of research could take days or weeks. Today, for many knowledge workers, access to information has become dramati...

Most organizations have two basic options when they need to improve how their people solve complex problems.

They can train them. Bring in an expert, teach a framework, practice it on a case or exerc...

Most organizations are teaching employees how to prompt AI.

Far fewer are teaching them how to think with it.

That distinction matters most when AI is being used for work that requires significant c...

Why “think more critically” is too vague—and how leaders can identify where the thinking process is actually breaking down.

Leaders see the symptoms every day. An employee overlooks a key stakeholder...

Most delegation fails for a simple reason: lack of clarity.

Not effort. Not intelligence. Not even capability.

Clarity.

When managers assign work, they often believe they’ve communicated effectivel...

When leaders encounter a problem that resists conventional analysis, the instinct is often to double down on data, debate assumptions, or refine existing models. Yet research in cognitive science and ...

During a board meeting I volunteer to attend, the treasurer presented financial projections that showed our fund balance would grow from under $2M to over $7M in 5 years. People were excited and pleas...

As AI takes over additional tasks, we will increasingly focus our efforts on skills like complex problem-solving. This is one of the reasons problem-solving makes LinkedIn’s list of the most-in demand...

Miscommunication is one of the leading causes of project delays and failures. According to the Project Management Institute, “ineffective communications is the primary contributor to project failure o...

Critical thinking is providing a robust answer to a question. One of the most basic and widely used ways we come to answers is to learn from the past and from others. We call these comparison-based re...

How you make sense of the information you read online has a direct effect on your life and your job. Most knowledge workers and managers spend a significant portion of their day searching and gatherin...

You do a brainstorming session with your team, compile the list of ideas, and then have everyone vote on which idea they think is most creative (i.e., valuable and novel). The idea with the most votes...