Software development has had methodologies such as Waterfall and Agile. It would be convenient to have something similar in place for SSE as well.
From here on, I’d like to introduce two development methodologies, but before that, this chapter will整理 (organize) the typical flow of soft skill development and what “soft skill development” means in the first place.
First, define what soft skill development is.
Up through Chapter 2, I emphasized the following three points:
Based on that, let’s define it.
Soft skill development refers to creating concepts and presenting them in a way that is easy for third parties to understand. There is actually a similar term: Umesao, author of The Techniques of Intellectual Production (1969), describes “intellectual production” as follows.
Simply put, intellectual production is using your head to produce something new—information—and presenting it in a form that other people can understand.
I consider intellectual production and SSE to be synonymous, but the term “intellectual production” has never been systematized to the present day. It’s from 50 years ago, and the term itself is too broad, so that’s understandable.
Returning to the point, soft skill development must satisfy all three of the following:
In particular, expression for third parties and submission are mandatory.
In SSE, we call something that has not been verbalized enough for third parties to understand an idea. So-called nonverbal information all falls under ideas. You must not escape into gestures, facial expressions, appearance, authority or other status, illustrations, and so on. You must express it in language. Only when something can be expressed in language can it be called a concept.
One more thing: the concepts expressed in this way must be submitted. When you hear “submit,” you might imagine handing something over between two people, but it’s not limited to that. It also includes putting it on a file server or cloud storage so stakeholders can access it, or publishing it online so people can access it. However, the recipient must be able to obtain it continuously. Concretely, you have two options: hand over the file/text that describes the concept, or publish it so it can be accessed at any time. Not handing it over directly, or publishing something that cannot be downloaded and then taking it down after three days, cannot be called submission.
To put it boldly, concepts are open. Concepts are inherently abstract, and even when they are concrete they are not secretive. Ideally, they should be something you can fully open on the internet. This property of being publishable at a level where anyone can access it at any time is called openness. Having openness is called being open.
Given the above, soft skill development can be restated as follows:
Soft skill development is expressing concepts so they can be submitted in language and with openness.
By the way, the soft skill tree may also be included as a development target, but the tree is not required. For example, I developed a way of working where any employee can do a 1on1 with anyone at any time, called “Free 1on1,” and it does not include a tree. It may include one; it doesn’t matter. For instance, you could bundle a tree like the following:
Let’s also cover what soft skill development is not:
We call these operations and submission, respectively. They are not development. In development, you merely make it possible to submit (and ideally, you’d like to make it possible to operate as well).
In that sense, the overall flow of soft skill development is Development → Submission → Operations.
As an exception, if you really want to proceed very secretly, “Development → Temporary Submission → Operations” could happen, but in SSE—at least in this book—we do not assume that. As already stated, in SSE, concepts are open.
Why should concepts be open? This is intentional. I, as the person who put SSE in order, made it that way intentionally.
The reason is simple: because we want sustained momentum. The value of openness—like the internet and open source—needs no explanation.
Also, in SSE, humans must act on their own by writing language and reading language. The act of reading and writing is unavoidable, so people need to become accustomed to it. In that sense too, we want the concepts we develop to circulate as widely as possible and be seen by as many people as possible.
This is an old story, but the internet in the 2000s was a text culture. This was before social media and smartphones appeared. As with blog trackbacks, someone would treat a piece of text someone else wrote as a toy, and then another person would write further. By writing and publishing as they pleased, things grew lively. Reading and writing are unglamorous and demanding acts, so motivation is extremely important. To cover this, you need both serendipity (an overflow of varied information) and reciprocity (your information being used). SSE must have enough potential for both to occur.
I wrote that in a somewhat convoluted way, but if you know the internet or open source, you should understand it with a single sentence: “It’s to harness that power.”
We defined soft skill development. I also stated that the overall flow is “Development → Submission → Operations.”
Next, I’d like to describe a slightly more concrete flow.
Let’s call it the ABCD Walk. This organizes the series of steps up to developing, submitting, and operating soft skills into four modes:
Reordered in a more intuitive sequence, it would look like this:
For a developer-oriented analogy: understanding the current state corresponds to preliminary investigation. Defining the problem corresponds to requirements definition. Collecting concepts corresponds to development. You don’t only create things from scratch; you also use and modify existing ones. You use libraries in development too, right? And putting actions into practice refers to all work after development.
If we map “Development → Submission → Operations,” it looks like this:
| ABCD Walk | Dev-Sub-Ops |
|---|---|
| Breakdown | - |
| Definition | - |
| Collection | Development |
| Action | Development, Submission, Operations |
What Collection is responsible for is collecting the parts called concepts. After collecting them, how you ultimately organize them falls under the next Action. Also, Action includes everything: submission and operations after development. In that sense, Action is very broad.
Why is it so broad? Because at the Action stage, circumstances outside pure soft skill engineering become deeply involved. Put simply, there is the context of the person and the organization, and proceeding according to that context requires appropriate power, politics, and sometimes luck. SSE doesn’t want to deal with those parts. Or rather, humanity has already explored those parts, so there’s little value in covering them again.
SSE’s focus is the modes other than Action: Breakdown, Definition, and Collection. That is, up to understanding the current state, defining the problem, and collecting concepts to solve it.
As stated so far, soft skill engineering deals with people and therefore has no inherent single right answer. What’s important is mobilizing as much creativity as possible to create concepts and organizing them so they can be used clearly. The subsequent Action can be done by those who can do it, and as already explored, it’s merely gritty work.
What SSE truly wants to deal with is the highly creative and difficult work in the phase before Action. Giving this reproducibility—would be overstating it—but we want to systematize it so that relatively anyone can handle it, and so we can raise the odds even a little.
Finally, let me explain the “walk” in ABCD Walk.
You can think of it as the “walk” in random walk. In other words, it means moving freely back and forth among A, B, C, and D. Put differently, it is not a cycle or a loop.
So it’s not something you do in order like Waterfall, nor something where you spin a cycle like Agile. It’s freer and more exploratory.
Soft skill development:
ABCD Walk: