The value of SSE is that it can remove the human bottleneck.
Modern times are difficult, and the bar of what’s expected of us keeps rising:
Even so, you can tell it’s a lie to say, “But technology and methods are advancing, so there won’t be any problems.” Plainly put, inequality is widening:
Inequality always produces “a few winners” and “many losers,” and across all places and times, losers are either not rewarded for their effort or are rewarded very little. People today aren’t ignorant, so they notice this underlying reality and quietly push back. This is so-called quiet quitting.
Why does inequality happen? Why, when technology and methods have advanced this much?
The answer is simple: because humans are the bottleneck.
We can’t even reliably do things like getting more than 7 hours of sleep a day, getting more than 2 hours of sunlight a day, replacing meetings with text communication, or making minutes or recordings of every meeting available. The reasons and circumstances vary: some people aren’t suited by disposition, some simply lack the skill, and some resist strongly because it’s too different from what they’re used to. In any case, we can’t even manage things at this level—things that should be commonplace given modern technology and methods.
In Chapter 1, I defined soft skills as “skills for handling people.”
This is a much more aggressive definition than the conventional one. Traditionally, people treated soft skills as “≈ communication skills” or “≈ interpersonal skills,” but bluntly speaking, those are merely skills for getting closer to the winners.
For example, Japan has a culture known as nommunication, where after-hours, ostensibly unofficial drinking parties are held, and a great deal of trust-building and decision-making happens there. Even aside from that, dining-based culture exists not only in Japan but around the world. That’s why skills around shared meals become important—but that’s simply because today’s winners follow that kind of culture (in the terms of Chapter 2, a Tenet), so others are told they should do the same. And yet, it’s treated as absolute, as though it were a hard skill.
It’s unfortunate. There are ways to build trust and make decisions besides dining together. It’s also possible to handle it through text communication. Not knowing these approaches—or refusing to accept them—comes down to nothing more than a lack of skill. It’s exactly the bottleneck.
So how, exactly, can we eliminate this kind of trivial bottleneck?
Of course, the answer is simply to change the approach and the way of thinking. In other words, it’s nothing but customizing people. It might sound easy, but it’s extremely difficult. Humanity probably hasn’t pioneered it yet—and I will likely be the pioneer. I’ve spent over a decade exploring this perspective, and in the end I zeroed in on soft skills. Soft Skill Engineering is what I call the practice of systematizing this innovative, advanced stance by borrowing the term “soft skills.”
Soft skills have the perspective and potential needed to eliminate the human bottleneck.