Presencing 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

One skill, one question

How Many Options Did You Actually Consider?

“Think about your last big decision. How many genuinely different alternatives did you explore before choosing?”

— Opportunity Seeking Skills

Opportunity Seeking 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

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

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

Try this today

Design the Conversation

Before your next group meeting, spend 5 minutes thinking about the structure. Who speaks first? What question opens the discussion? How will you make sure quieter voices are heard?

Relationship 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

One skill, one question

What Are You Not Questioning?

“What’s one thing your team does ‘because we’ve always done it that way’ — and what would happen if you stopped?”

— Opportunity Seeking Skills

Opportunity Seeking 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

How Many Options Did You Actually Consider?

The Line Manager Is the Variable Your Programme Design Keeps Ignoring

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

Sketch It, Don’t Say It

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

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

Design the Conversation

Outputs vs. Outcomes

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

What Are You Not Questioning?

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