Bottleneck skills

A consolidated summary from one of Gerald Weinberg’s stories on bottleneck skill and importance of specific feedback.

Skills are multiplicative in nature. Not additive.

A teacher’s skills can be explained as

    subject knowledge (0.8)
x   ability to easily explain (0.2) 
--------------------------------------
=   0.16

If someone is told to do better at their job (vague feedback), they fallback to improve their most comfortable skill.

    subject knowledge (0.9)
x   ability to easily explain (0.2) 
------------------------------
=   0.18  (increase of +0.02)

If it was additive in nature, it wouldn’t matter which skill you improve. But our bottleneck skill is our communication in this case not subject depth. By working on our weakness, we do better overall. (this is where specific feedback helps)

    subject knowledge (0.8) 
x   ability to easily explain (0.3)
------------------------------
=   0.24 (increase of +0.08)

Something to think about:

Your job is a collection of which skills? And which one are you trying to improve? Is it the convenient one or your actual bottleneck?

The people giving you feedback, do they have relevant context? Is the feedback specific and actionable? Or is it too vague for you to improve upon?

Can you delegate your bottleneck skills? Or find someone who can supplement you to do better overall? Can you help someone with their bottleneck skills?