Opportunity-seeking Skills Archives

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Skills & Frameworks

Scientific Reasoning: The Skill That Stops You Defending Your First Good Idea

Scientific reasoning is the ability to hold your own conclusions as hypotheses rather than positions. It is one of the five i2 skill clusters and the one people most often assume they already have. The point is not being right more often. It is being wrong more cheaply, while the cost of the correction is still small.

4 Aug 2026 6 min read

Research & Evidence

How to Tell Whether a Skills Claim Is Backed by Anything

You do not need to evaluate a study properly to judge whether a skills claim is credible. Five questions expose most weak ones: what was measured and by whom, compared with what, how long afterwards, who dropped out, and who funded it. Most impressive figures fail on the first two.

4 Aug 2026 6 min read

Try this today

Sketch It, Don’t Say It

Take an idea you’ve been explaining with words and draw it instead. It doesn’t need to be pretty — boxes, arrows, and stick figures count. Share it and see if it lands differently.

Presencing Skills

Learning & Development

The Line Manager Is the Variable Your Programme Design Keeps Ignoring

Whether training sticks depends mostly on what happens in the weeks afterwards, and the line manager controls that environment. Most designs treat manager support as an information problem and send a briefing email. It is a workload and accountability problem. Give managers a specific task with a deadline, not a request to be supportive.

4 Aug 2026 5 min read

Leadership & Teams

Your Team Keeps Reopening the Same Decision. Here Is Why.

Teams that keep revisiting the same decision are rarely being obstructive. Something in the original decision was never closed: no named owner, no actual commitment, incompatible interpretations, or an objection that was acknowledged but never answered. Each version needs a different fix, which is why generic decision frameworks disappoint.

4 Aug 2026 6 min read

One skill, one question

What Problem Are You Not Seeing?

“When was the last time you looked for a problem worth solving — instead of waiting for one to land on your desk?”

— Opportunity Seeking Skills

Opportunity Seeking Skills

Higher Education

When AI Can Write the Essay, What Are You Actually Assessing?

The essay was never valued for itself. It was indirect evidence of thinking, and that inference has quietly stopped being valid. Detection and invigilation are losing responses. The workable direction is to move assessment closer to the process and to say clearly, per task, what use of AI is expected.

4 Aug 2026 6 min read

Future of Work

Who Trains the Juniors Now That AI Does the Junior Work?

AI is doing the work that used to train people. The apprenticeship model is dissolving one delegated task at a time, and the cost arrives years after the headcount decision that caused it. The fix is not restricting the tools. It is changing what managers ask for and what they inspect.

4 Aug 2026 6 min read

One skill, one question

What Did the Last Failure Teach You?

“Think of a project that didn’t work out. Did you extract a clear lesson from it — or did you just move on?”

— Scientific Reasoning Skills

Scientific Reasoning Skills

Future of Work

Outputs vs. Outcomes

When AI can produce anything, the only thing that matters is what you do with it. The Direction of Travel AI doesn’t hallucinate the way it did two years ago. It won’t hallucinate the way…

11 Jun 2026 1 min read

Future of Work

AI Brain Fry and Shadow AI: Why Human-AI Collaboration Is the Skill Set Nobody Is Training For

AI brain fry and shadow AI are two sides of the same problem: organisations have rolled out AI faster than they have built the human capability to use it well. The real work is not about better tools or tighter policies. It is about developing the meta skills that enable healthy, productive collaboration with AI.

13 Apr 2026 7 min read

Try this today

Listen Like a Journalist

In your next one-on-one, pretend you’re interviewing the other person for a story. Focus only on understanding their experience. Don’t offer advice. Just ask follow-up questions.

Relationship Skills

Skills & Frameworks

Reflection Skills: The Quiet Capability That Makes Everything Else Work Better

Reflection is the skill most people overlook and the one that makes every other capability work better. It is the ability to step back, notice your own patterns, and learn from experience in a way that actually changes what you do next. Research shows it is the strongest predictor of growth across all innovation skills.

9 Apr 2026 7 min read

i2 Insights

Test your innovation skills

Scientific Reasoning: The Skill That Stops You Defending Your First Good Idea

How to Tell Whether a Skills Claim Is Backed by Anything

Sketch It, Don’t Say It

The Line Manager Is the Variable Your Programme Design Keeps Ignoring

Your Team Keeps Reopening the Same Decision. Here Is Why.

What Problem Are You Not Seeing?

When AI Can Write the Essay, What Are You Actually Assessing?

Who Trains the Juniors Now That AI Does the Junior Work?

What Did the Last Failure Teach You?

Outputs vs. Outcomes

AI Brain Fry and Shadow AI: Why Human-AI Collaboration Is the Skill Set Nobody Is Training For

Listen Like a Journalist

Reflection Skills: The Quiet Capability That Makes Everything Else Work Better