The Skills-Based Mirage: What Organizations Miss When They Reduce People to Capabilities

I’ve been watching something curious happen over the past few years. In every conversation about the future of work, skills have become the answer. The answer to how we hire, to how we retain, to the need of agility and innovation, to AI shortening the life expectancy of skills. Whatever the question, the logic is the same: break jobs into tasks, match tasks with skills, plug people where they fit. It’s neat. Efficient. Hard not to be seduced by the elegance of it. “Skills-Based Organizations”…

But I find myself uneasy with how easily we’ve fallen in love with this approach. 

At WDHB, we don’t reject the concept of skills. But we’re deeply skeptical of the way it’s being framed, as if skills could somehow encapsulate the full depth and messiness of people and what they bring to organizations.

What we see, what we experience with clients, tells a different story. The most powerful shifts we witness don’t come from people acquiring new skills. They come from a rupture. From that precise moment when someone sees their context differently, or questions the story they’ve been telling themselves for years. On our programs, we have seen leaders change course not because they learned how to use a new tool, but because they started asking better questions. Because they touched something that felt more like purpose than performance. That’s why our programs often leave participants speechless. Not because they’ve filled a skills gap (and that doesn’t really happen that often). But because something deeper has shifted within them.

So I’ve been trying to make sense of this disconnect. On one side, the Skills- Based Organization; on the other, the actual humans in those organizations: complex, surprising, unpredictable beings.

The SBO promises a kind of liberation from old hierarchies and past-oriented (or even anachronic) organization of labor. Roles disappear. Teams become flexible. Learning becomes continuous and organic. But beneath that promise, I see something else taking shape: a risk of reduction, and a quiet erasure of what doesn’t fit.

What counts as a skill, anyway? And who decides? I keep wondering about all the things that resist definition. Out of the top of my head: empathy, intuition, the ability to hold a room (crucial for our facilitators)… None of that fits easily into a competency grid!

And then there’s the culture piece. The more we move toward gig-like structures for a gig-centric economy and its modular teams, the more I see cultures fragment. Rituals dissolve and disappear. The invisible threads that make people feel like they belong start to vanish, because they are not part of the equation. I mean, we don’t build belongingness nor trust in spreadsheets, cells C3 or D9. We build it in the in-between. In the shared meals. The side conversations. The rituals of showing up, listening, asking questions, wondering, being a part of something, belonging.

Even bias finds new ways to survive (or even thrive) in SBOs. If we aren’t careful, we just trade one set of exclusions for another—this time favoring what can be measured and mapped easily. And in doing so, we risk overlooking the very people who’ve always had to fight to be seen beyond their resumes, background or cultural heritage.

But what troubles me most is the loss of story. When we reduce people to what they can do, we forget who they’re trying to become. We strip away their narrative, the connective tissue that gives a career its arc and a life its meaning. How would you feel presenting yourself as a list of skills rather than sharing who you are?

I don’t want to build systems that are merely efficient. I want to build ones that are humane. Ones that recognize that real learning is not a download of skills into a competency grid. It’s a practice. It’s uncomfortable. It’s collective. It lives in the tension between what you know and what you’re about to discover.

And so I keep coming back to this question. What future are we really growing into with these SBOs as a one-fits-all perspective?

If the goal is to unlock human potential, then let’s not stop at skills. In the end, they are just one of the thousand steps we take throughout life on the way to becoming. Just a little piece of the puzzle of our identities, and surely, not the most important piece by which people should be considered. Let’s design organizations as spaces where we can, as well as in other places, grow and become together.