Going Soft

Want to master the art of conversation? Just think of a brass nameplate in front of a white house from whose chimney a yellow work glove extends, holding an airplane with tennis rackets for propellers. No, you didn’t misread that sentence. For Harper’s, Lily Scherlis explores our alleged “soft skills” crisis, from its management-science roots to the $20 billion industry developed to soothe business leaders’ ongoing anxieties over an ill-defined set of abilities. Her critical history is bracketed by her own experiences at a three-day “people skills” course in Manhattan, complete with convoluted mnemonic devices and role-playing exercises. “If you master the art of people skills–oh my goodness!” a breathless facilitator tells Scherlis. “The world is like an oyster.” That is, something to be extracted, pried open, and thoughtlessly shucked.

When I mention soft skills to the occasional corporate leaders I meet through my research, they look grave. They tell me how crucial soft skills are and how hard it is to find them in job candidates, as though they were an elusive species of bird being hunted to death. Yet when I ask what they are or how they’re measured, no one can quite tell me. Researchers note that it’s hard to slot soft skills alongside the more rigorous conceptions we have of “skill”—a category once used to rank industrial workers on the basis of what kinds of machines they knew how to use. When I do encounter real social grace, it doesn’t seem like a matter of technical mastery, inherited privilege, or even virtuosity. It instead feels like a rare gift of real responsiveness—it offers a tiny glimpse of the sublime experience of brushing up against another person’s subjectivity.

Even as soft skills claim to be a solution to automation, they also help you automate yourself, reducing human interaction to an arsenal of techniques programmed into the mind. Soft skills will apparently rescue us from redundancy even as they render human interaction a little more mechanical. Oddly, the crisis is not about how we will operate or control machines. It’s about how we will operate and control one another.