The context of this blogpost is captured here. In short, this is a part of Q & A i did with Women Testers website recently on the topic of careers and beyond. The questions were asked mostly by people who were at the early stages of their career. The series can be located at: https://www.womentesters.com/q-and-a-with-anuj-magazine-part-2/
Q) According to you what are the top 5 skills a context driven agile tester needs to have by 2019?
[Anuj] To be honest, i think i may not be the best person to answer about agile testing skills as i don’t practice it daily. But i do find this question important and would like to share a different perspective around it.
I prefer to look at this question from the point of view of ‘First Principles thinking’ which i fundamentally believe in.
In layman’s terms, first principles thinking is basically the practice of actively questioning every assumption you think you ‘know’ about a given problem or scenario — and then creating new knowledge and solutions from scratch. Almost like a newborn baby.
Elon Musk, as an example, is a huge proponent of first principles thinking and that’s probably why he has been able to invent many distinctive companies in a time-frame most people are struggling to get one career right.
As Elon indicates, first principles thinking essentially focuses on bringing things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy.
Reasoning by analogy, on the contrary, is building knowledge and solving problems based on prior assumptions, beliefs and widely held ‘best practices’ approved by majority of people.
Applying first principles thinking to this discussion around skills, i firmly believe that most skills are built on a strong foundation of elementary skills. Here’s a list of those elementary skills:
1. Listening
2. Speaking and communicating
3. Reading and comprehension
4. Writing
5. Hunger to create a lasting impact
Interestingly the skills from #1 to #4 i.e. listening, speaking, reading, writing are the first 4 skills we learn in our lives. They are very fundamental to our being yet they play a significant part in dictating eventual success. As much elementary as these sound, i am pretty confident in my hypotheses that a career built on a strong foundation of these skills will certainly outlast and outperform the career that gives less importance to these.
Irony of our times is that employees are disproportionately focused on improving functional skills (e.g. subject of this question agile testing skills) and spend almost no time practicing these foundation skills. Let me share a few perspectives about these skills before coming to practice bit.
Listening: Adam Grant’s book ‘Give and Take’ beautifully drives home the point that givers are the most effective employees than the takers and the matchers. Beyond these, there is one more category of employees that I prefer to call ‘expert receivers’. Receivers are the people who are awesome at receiving anything concrete. I have been a big fan of Subroto Bagchi’s books and way of thinking and in one of the conversations, he beautifully sums up: “it is a power to receive which is the bigger determinant of success, not the power to give.”
A good leader may tune herself to give equal mentoring, advise and opportunity to her team of 5 people. But we still see that only one of five may eventually exceeds expectations. Why? The reason can be attributed to person’s power to receive and assimilate information, everything else being equal. How do you inculcate ‘power to receive‘ ? Simply by improving the way you listen.
One message: Practice active listening.
Public speaking skills: Indra Nooyi once said: “You cannot over-invest in communication skills”. You may have all the knowledge in the world but if you haven’t equipped yourself to communicate it impactfully, you cannot mobilize people, you cannot achieve momentum in the projects, your career cannot attain the trajectory it deserves.
Reading and comprehension: At the year-end time, one of the things that I am fascinated with is looking at the year-end reading summary of people I admire. One thing that’s constant with most effective people all-around is that they are all well read. They have their white-spaces filled with undistracted reading time. So reading skills are a given if you are looking to build a successful career. However, one of the most under-rated skills is comprehension. I know many people measure themselves by the number of books they read. It’s a good measure of your stickiness to reading habit but it doesn’t measure effectiveness. Comprehension abilities fill that effectiveness gap. As a skill, one should evolve reading habits with time. One should work consciously on improving comprehension abilities. Would highly recommend going through this blog and honestly assess and improve the flaws in the way you read: https://fs.blog/reading/
Writing: I am a professionally qualified handwriting analyst. A handwriting analyst can decipher personality traits from one’s handwriting. During the course of getting trained in handwriting analysis, I learned quite a few ‘parallel’ skills such as NLP, graphotherapy. Graphotherapy, for example, deals with a changing one’s personality by changing one’s handwriting. Like with anything, there are believers and non-believers in this. But, the larger point that I am driving towards is that writing on paper helps to connect with your inner-self. I heard the entrepreneur Alok Kejriwal mention that one should write at least one page a day. In addition to improving your writing skills, it is also a sort of self-purification process. A process that helps you clear the traffic jam of thoughts in your mind. One way I have found helpful in improving writing skills is to read and observe the email communication from the leaders you admire. Inculcate good points in your writing.
Hunger to create a lasting impact: One of the business leaders that I admire, Prakash Iyer when asked what he would suggest for people to play to their full potential, said: PHD, which is:
Passion: which gives us direction
Hunger: momentum
Discipline: shows the way forward
In the various global innovation programs that I have run from my organization, most teams struggle to find time to do justice to their innovation projects (which is often in addition to their regular work). All things being equal, the teams that eventually do well are not the ones that have more skills or potential but really are the teams that have more fire in the belly, more hunger to succeed. To me, that feeling of hunger (how badly you want the outcome you desire) is the single biggest factor leading to success.
Given the elementary nature of these skills, we often take these for granted i.e. since we have been doing these for many years, we may consider ourselves being good at it. That may be true but more often it is not.
How can one improve on these skills ?
The answer lies in a process known as ‘deliberate practice’. Andrew Ng, the world-renowned AI expert, in this profound experience sharing describes how he turned-around the flaws in his public speaking by embracing the deliberate practice. To quote him:
We all know that to get better at a musical instrument or a sport, you have to practice. Practice does not simply mean “doing the activity over and over.” Instead, you learn fastest when you engage in a focused process called deliberate practice, in which you repeatedly attempt an especially challenging part of the task.
When the best musicians are working to improve, they don’t just play their favorite tunes for hours. Instead, they pick a short but challenging passage in a larger musical piece, and repeatedly play that passage until they get it right. Athletes use a similar process to hone their skills. This is hard work—you focus in every attempt, try to figure out what you’re doing wrong, and tweak your performance to make it better. If you do it right, you might be mentally drained after 30 minutes.
