I’m always fascinated about how the brain works. I’ve always been pretty analytical and love to connect dots. Puzzle games like Sudoku and Tangled Rope suck me in as I compute my next moves and look to understand the landscape and solve the problems.

That naturally lends to an affinity for solution architecture. Hearing the challenges, looking into the connections, computing the inputs and outputs and developing solutions all involve these skills.

Sometimes I can almost feel the visual I’m sharing here – I can feel my brain working like this – filing pieces of information away, making computations, looking at patterns.

While this is a fabulous skill that’s necessary when working through requirements or designing solutions. It goes hand in hand with the ability to talk to people. To be able to ask the right questions. To be able to simplify information to make it relatable and understandable. To be able to continue to circle back to the right topics and avoid rabbit trails or trying to boil oceans.

Don’t neglect developing and continuing to work on these soft skills. There are so many awesome new technology advances that it’s easy to focus on the hard technical skills, but it can’t be an ‘either/or’ – it has to be an ‘and’ – a great solution architect has both technical skills AND people skills.

If you’ve been reading my posts for a while you’ve probably seen a theme around soft skills, building trust and how these are critical in the age of AI – it’s definitely a passion of mine.

Do you have a good mix of hard/soft skills? How often do you do targeting training on your soft skills? Not sure where to start? Let me know and I can point to some great resources!