What the best do, and why it can be taught
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.
Skill Modeling is the study of how a human competence is actually built, and of how it can be handed on to someone else.
Some people do difficult things well. They negotiate a tense meeting without it turning, they read a room before anyone speaks, they change a habit that had resisted for years. Ask them how, and the answer is rarely useful. Not because they hide it, but because most of what they do has stopped being visible to them.
Modeling is the work of making it visible again. Observing the competence where it happens, extracting the structure underneath it, testing whether that structure holds in someone else's hands. What comes out is not advice. It is a model, and a model can be taught.
This site gathers that work: the method itself, the models it has produced so far, and the reasoning behind them.
Skill Modeling is written by Christian Vanhenten. The site is being built through the summer of 2026. Articles appear as they are written, in English and in French.
Stay in touch
New models, articles and work in progress, a few times a year. No more than that.