The Collaborative Skills Palette

March 17th 2026 | 2 mins | Skills & Practices

The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Skills Taxonomy confirms that important work skills cluster around working with others, self-efficacy, and cognitive skills. But these fundamental skills are no longer sufficient. AI is not just automating tasks, it will restructure the entire system of work. The capacity to direct, integrate, and evaluate AI outputs is becoming a baseline requirement, not a specialist capability.

This demands a more nuanced set of skills that go beyond what most training catalogues currently cover. The Collaborative Skills Palette names them and shows why they matter now.

Why call this a palette?

A painter’s palette holds all the colours they need but it does not prescribe the painting. The skill lies in knowing which colours to reach for, how to combine them, and when a particular blend is exactly right for the moment in front of you.

There is no universal sequence of skills that applies equally to every team, every challenge, or every stage of a project. Teams working in complex, fast-changing environments need the same flexibility. The ability to read what a situation requires and reach for the right skills at the right moment.

The Collaborative Skills Palette gives teams a shared vocabulary, currently thirteen skills across three areas, without suggesting that all thirteen need to be deployed at once, in order, or in equal measure

You can download The Collaborative Skills Palette at Dropbox

“The biggest thing you should take away from Google Aristotle is that how teams work matters more than who is on them.

You can take a team of average performers, and if you teach them to interact in the right way, they’ll do things no superstar could ever accomplish.

Lazlo Block, Former head of the People Operations at Google, 2015

The most important audience that you need to ignite is your internal culture. Invest here, then go external.

Duke Stump, Former CMO NIKE, Seventh Generation, Lululemon