The Human Skills Our Future Depends On
Learned deliberately. Applied across life.
Who We Are
We can engineer self-driving cars, yet struggle to navigate difficult conversations.
We can analyse complex data, yet freeze when decisions carry emotional weight.
We can predict human behaviour at scale, yet remain unskilled at regulating our own emotions.
This isn’t a failure of intelligence.
It’s a failure of what we choose to teach.
Technical capability has advanced faster than human capability, and too many of the skills required to live, work, and lead well have been left to chance.
Oka exists to change that.
what oka does
Oka is an organisation focused on rebuilding the human skills that shape life outcomes.
The skills Oka works with are well established in psychology, neuroscience, education, and organisational research. They are consistently linked to:
stronger wellbeing and emotional resilience
better decision-making under pressure
healthier relationships and social functioning
sustained performance over time
higher life satisfaction and sense of agency
improved life outcomes
They are also the skills most critical in a future shaped by AI, because they govern judgment, collaboration, adaptability, and responsibility in ways technology cannot replace.
Oka’s work makes these skills explicit, learnable, and transferable, rather than assumed or inherited.
Why this matters, especially now.
The skills Oka focuses on shape how people cope, decide, relate, and lead.
They influence health, resilience, performance, and life satisfaction over time. They also determine how well people function under pressure, which matters more as work accelerates and AI takes on more cognitive load.
These skills are often picked up through background rather than taught. When that happens, advantage compounds and talent is lost.
Oka treats this as a learning problem. One that affects individuals and society.
bottom up
Oka works directly with individuals and groups to build these skills where they matter most.
This includes:
workshops and experiences for students and early-career adults using elements of Discovering You intertwined with other existing approaches
programmes embedded in universities, education settings, and sport
applied learning that addresses real problems while building transferable human skills
This work is practical, structured, and grounded in lived experience.
It also functions as ongoing learning: refining how these skills are taught, remembered, and carried forward.
discovering you!
What is Discovering You?
Discovering You is a psychologically grounded framework that helps people understand and map how they develop over time. For example, how they make sense of experience, build confidence, form relationships, and take action in the world.
It has evolved from the work set out in Defining You, an award-winning book (by Fiona Murden) grounded in over two decades of applied psychological practice across leadership, education, and performance contexts. The framework has since been used and refined through work with young adults, early-career professionals, and leaders, and has continued to evolve as new research, social contexts, and future-of-work demands have emerged.
Discovering You is not a fixed curriculum. It provides a stable psychological structure that is personalised to each individual and can be revisited and deepened as a person matures over time.
What makes the framework distinctive
Defining You gives people a stable internal structure for learning acting as the ‘psychological spine’.
Most skills programmes add tools. This framework organises experience. It helps people connect what they’re learning to how they already understand themselves - their patterns, reactions, and choices - so learning has somewhere to land.
Because the structure relates to the self, new skills are easier to remember and easier to retrieve under pressure. They allow people to makes sense of situations as they unfold.
The framework also works with narrative. People naturally interpret their lives as a story. Defining You uses that tendency deliberately, helping individuals place skills within their own lived timeline rather than treating them as generic techniques.
Finally, it builds reflective awareness into action. People learn to notice what’s happening internally, adjust in real time, and refine behaviour through use, not through analysis alone.
This combination of structure, self-reference, narrative, and lived practice is what allows learning to transfer across contexts and hold over time.
Top-down
changing how this works at scale
Alongside direct delivery, Oka works at a systems level.
This includes:
collaborating with workforce and future-of-work bodies
advising institutions on how human skills sit alongside technical and AI capability
convening interdisciplinary conversations and research across psychology, education, data, technology, culture, sport, and lived experience
identifying and amplifying examples of good practice already working in different parts of the world
Oka’s role is not to replace existing efforts, but to connect them and to translate insight across boundaries that rarely meet.
Women and under-represented groups
Many of these skills are unevenly distributed because of access and life circumstances.
Women and under-represented groups are more likely to:
navigate systems without informal sponsorship or role models
carry disproportionate emotional and relational labour
be judged more harshly for mistakes or uncertainty
be expected to “figure it out” without explicit guidance
Oka’s work makes the implicit explicit.
By naming and teaching these skills deliberately, Oka helps level the playing field, reducing reliance on confidence, background, or proximity to power.
This is about fixing what systems fail to teach.
From individuals to society
When people develop these skills early and consistently:
they cope better with stress and change
they perform more reliably over time
they make decisions with greater awareness of impact
they contribute more sustainably to work, family, and community
At scale, this shapes healthier organisations, fairer systems, and more resilient societies.
Better human skills improve individual lives — and the societies those lives create.
About Oka
Oka was founded by Fiona Murden, an organisational psychologist, author, and educator and researcher.
For over two decades, Fiona has worked across leadership, healthcare, education, sport, and creative industries observing and applying what enables people to function well under pressure, and what leads capable people to struggle, withdraw, or unravel.
Oka is the organisational expression of that work.
It exists to ensure that the human skills most closely linked to life outcomes, wellbeing, resilience, and performance are not treated as abstract ideas or personal advantages, but as learnable capabilities, grounded in evidence and taught deliberately.
The work Oka develops is informed by psychology and neuroscience, and shaped in dialogue with expertise from education, data and analytics, workforce development, sport, technology, and lived experience. It is applied in real settings with individuals, students, teams, and institutions, where it can be observed, tested, adjusted, and stress-tested under real conditions.
Learning designs are refined through delivery, feedback, and reflection, and challenged through interdisciplinary input rather than protected by a single theoretical lens. What proves useful is kept. What doesn’t transfer is revised or discarded.
Oka’s role is not to invent new human skills, but to integrate what is already known, across disciplines and contexts, and translate it into practical approaches that people can use, remember, and carry forward over time.
This is how Oka ensures the work remains psychologically grounded, ethically held, and responsive to a changing world.
