I think (and I’m not the first to say this) NDM really suffers from a branding problem.
If you say ‘deliberate practice’, people think “ahh, practicing deliberately, that makes sense!” (Even though it’s not about that).
But Naturalistic Decision Making? What’s that?
Whereas if I say “tacit skill extraction”, suddenly people pay attention.
And then if I follow it up with “it’s totally not theoretical, it’s been used for training and UI design in the military and in health care for three decades”, they REALLY pay attention.
“Wait, does this mean I can use these techniques on experts around me to learn from them?”
Yes.
“And I can use it to interview expert users, so I can design UIs to enable or augment their expertise?”
“Wait, you mean to say you don’t have to synthesise the expertise into an easily consumable framework?”
The bar is lower. You probably have some idea of the shape of the expertise, but you don’t have to do TOO much theorycrafting.
“So you just do simulation exercises as a form of training?”
Yes! It seems that NDM training prioritises ‘cognitive fidelity’. So long as the simulation exercise captures salient features of the actual task, you get fairly rapid expertise acquisition.
In fact they wrote a whole book for the Department of Defence on accelerating trial and error cycles! It’s called Accelerated Expertise: goodreads.com/book/show/1739…
If you want to get started with NDM, there’s an easier path now. A couple of the field’s OG researchers have set up something they’re calling the CTA Institute. Courses are available for pre-order now: cta.institute
“… we noticed that highly talented business performers are very similar to each other. (…) business is an orderly closed system of relations between principles, and so-called intuitive experts in business have an implicit grasp of this.”
3/ That's an excerpt from her chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Expertise, a chonky book that I shouldn't have any right in owning.
The excerpt was so compelling I dove into Lia DiBello's entire publication history.
My most useful tip for writing job postings is the same as my most commonly shared tip for writing, period: show, don't tell.
You want to give lots of little, hard-to-lie details that SHOW you mean what you're saying.
Don't write 'you'll have a lot of autonomy'. Write 'we want you to iterate on picking, experimenting, and measuring new marketing channels, with the support of leadership'.
Don't write 'you'll receive on-the-job training'; write 'you don't need to have domain experience because we'll teach you that. What we need you to have is a strong grasp of marketing fundamentals, so you can hit the ground running on execution.'
Totally obvious once you know it exists, but training methods for when you can extract tacit expertise (assuming you have access to experts, and the skill to do so) look VERY different from training methods without such an ability.
Example: tacit expertise is basically a pattern recognition process that generates 4 things: cues, expectancies, a prioritised and fluid list of goals, and an action script.
So, with this in mind, your training program ends up looking like a series of scenario simulations.
This is very different from the ‘pedagogical development and subskill identification’ view of teaching.
Here it’s “what series of varied scenarios may I design that allows students to gain the right set of cues, expectancies, goals, and actions that experts tacitly generate?”
1/ My post on product taste spent 1 day on the Hacker News front page.
In that piece, I argued that 'product validation frameworks like Lean Startup consist of two bits: an explicit bit which is process, and a tacit bit which is product taste.'
So what IS product taste?
2/ If you want to succeed at product, you need to build taste. This is really the hard bit of the game.
I've spent about a decade collecting links and snippets about product taste, mostly because I suck at it (and I'm still trying to get better).
Here are some of them.
3/ Paul Buchheit, in 2010: 'if your product is great, it doesn't have to be good'.
Something that's always bothered me: product validation frameworks (Lean Startup, etc, but mostly Lean Startup) usually talk about the methodology like the methodology is the thing.
Product taste is tacit, and so it doesn't get talked about as much. Here's a throwaway paragraph in Working Backwards, for instance, on Amazon's PR/FAQ process:
(It *does* seem like it runs on the backs of 'people who've done it before, doesn't it?)
Corollary: if you attempt to copy the process without putting in place experienced people, the people with good product taste, odds are pretty good that you'll fail.