Soft skills are hard skills

Funnily enough for someone in the information technology field, my wife often gives thanks to her humanities education, specifically her degree in literature. Okay, she's not a techie, working on the consulting side of things, but even so, what's her knowledge of Hardy and Donne got to do with use cases and business analysis?

"Communication." That's the word she keeps going back to. Frighteningly large swathes of even the most technical jobs come down to people giving each other information, and the organisation and readability of this material has a huge bearing on quality of life for all involved. But creating elegant communication doesn't come easily.

Everything hinges on an ability to step out of yourself and see things through another's eyes, and act of imagination and an open mind. "True open-mindedness," says a friend, "is always traced back to a child with a book." When children read, she claims, they become the people who pick new things on menus, who look past their dislikes to give things and people a chance, who don't have phobias of people with different preferences from theirs. They're the people who are interested and excited when hearing of strange things, of new things; not the ones whose primary reactions are suspiciousness and dismissal.

When I looked dubious about the generalisation, she said, "I know there are open-minded people who aren't readers, but I can bet they've been exposed to a range of ideas as a child. Maybe their reading parents. But unless they read themselves, there's always a wall."

I believe everyone has walls of some sort, and true open-mindedness is perfection — unattainable. (Open-minded people with a horror of close-minded or intolerant people for example.) But I agree that the most valuable lesson of reading is not the information you glean, the cultures you see, the words you learn, but the very idea of ideas.

That there are different, perhaps strange, ways to look at the same thing, and this is okay. That there are weird things to be found in the minds of other people, but this is also okay.

Overarching theme

This openness to ideas and the idea of ideas translates itself to many things, and surprisingly, professionalism in the corporate workplace is one of them. How can you be a perfectionist when you don't know that your creation is lacking? How can you understand what the client needs when you can't see things from another point of view? Literature trains you to do this: to understand context and background; to step away from the specific lines of the conversation and see the general idea, the overarching theme.

The problem with the attitude of many companies to these abilities is that they're just the icing. The final, finishing touches on an employee — desirable, but not essential. My wife is frequently frustrated by new clients who focus on the specifics of what she knows — the business area or the software programmes. "Those are tools, and tools can be learned", she says. Things like elegant communication, empathy, good listening and structured thinking are a lot harder to acquire over a couple of weeks on a new project that's already — inevitably — two months behind schedule.

It's sad that so many engineers even today come from a black-and-white education system and a culture that looks down on a humanities education — seeing it as the last refuge of the ‘failures' who couldn't get into the sciences or at least, commerce. This failing shows over and over again in offices, and as my friend put it, "There's no such thing as a good software engineer with bad communication skills. That's just a bad software engineer."

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.