1/ Let's talk a little about how people learn in the real world.
No, I'm not going to talk about classroom instruction, or pedagogical development, or enrolling in a cohort based course. None of that.
Just a simple question: how do people ACTUALLY learn from doing?
2/ The study of learning in real world environments is known as macrocognition.
Fancy name, simple meaning: it just means that these theories aren't constructed by observation of humans in a lab, but are instead formed from real world observation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrocogn…
3/ The questions these researchers had went something like this: how is it that some people become experts through trial and error, and others do not or cannot?
Sure, it's great if you can take a course, or a coach. You will likely learn faster. But what if you can't?
4/ It turns out there's a theory about this. It's called Cognitive Transformation Theory, or CTT.
It tells us how people build expertise in the real world.
Think: less pianists and chess and more business and leadership and investing.
5/ The theory's central claim is that we learn by replacing flawed mental models with better ones. The key word is REPLACE.
Here's the catch: the more advanced our mental models, the easier it is for us to ignore anomalous data, or to explain them away. This blocks progress.
6/ What do I mean by this? Well, let's say you're trying to get better in the real world. This means trial and error.
If the learning environment is kind, you can improve quickly. You build mental models that help you achieve your goals. You become good at what you do.
Yay!
7/ But most of the time, the learning environment is messy. Learning is hard.
This should be obvious: you don't know what cues to look for in your experiences because you don't have good models. But you can't build good mental models because you don't notice the right cues!
8/ Worse, having an instructor point out these cues to you might make you worse in the long term. You need to learn to learn from experience.
Learning better from experience means 2 things: 1) getting good at introspection ('sensemaking') and 2) DESTROYING old mental models.
9/ So here we get at the heart of the theory.
CTT tells us that we learn only when we destroy old mental models. We DON'T learn when we are refining an existing model.
It also tells us that it gets harder to unlearn when our mental models become more sophisticated.
Read:
10/ This explains a bunch of things. It tells us why expertise building with trial and error is discontinuous. You hit plateaus, and then you make jumps.
11/ It also explains the importance of having loose feedback loops. One of the best blog posts on this idea is @brianluidog's Beware of Tight Feedback Loops: brianlui.dog/2020/05/10/bew…
Lui talks about how having loose feedback loops are important for investing and life.
12/ With CTT, this makes more sense. CTT tells us you need to destroy old mental models to progress. i.e. you should hold on to old mental models loosely.
It ALSO implies that those who cannot hold their mental models loosely will plateau at an intermediate skill level forever.
13/ This sort of gets at the heart of business expertise. In the late 2000s, @LiaDiBello4 argued that cognitive agility (the ability for one to update one's mental models in the face of new information) is a better predictor of business ability compared to problem solving ability
14/ In business, as in life, what matters is how quickly you can leave old mental models behind. Not necessarily how smart you are or how high your IQ is.
Why? Because learning in business is from trial and error.
And CTT tells us how to learn better from trial and error.
16/ Follow for more threads on learning in real world, messy environments. Tomorrow, I'll talk about the six ways people ignore anomalous data, in order to hold on to their mental models.
US Military, Naturalistic Decision Making researchers: "in order to accelerate expertise, we need to design our training programs to destroy existing mental models"
Good businesspeople: "how can we distill wisdom from the air?"
Clarification on the 'distill wisdom from the air' bit — that's from Robert Kuok's biography, in reference to the way uneducated Chinese businessmen learn. Mostly by reflecting on experiences and observing widely.
There was a meme sometime back on “what is the deliberate practice of your domain?” With this theory of learning, we can say that the question is ill-formed, because DP can only be done in domains with clear pedagogical development, with a coach who has that pedagogy.
This week's Commonplace piece is about @johncutlefish's ability to diagnose a product team's issues within 5-20 minutes of talking to them, and what we learnt when we did a tacit skill extraction session together: commoncog.com/blog/john-cutl…
When John talks to a product team, the call progresses through four stages. The bulk of the magic happens in stage 2 (John intuitively knows what to ask and where to dig), with some leftover awesomeness happening in stage 3 (John gives them an ordered list of experiments to try).
A lot of what he does is picking up on tiny cues.
For instance (and also the biggest thing I learnt): good product teams are comfortable with uncertainty, and able to articulate what they know and don't know and are working to find out.
At the 2016 Olympic games, where he won gold, he said: "I wanted to prove that a lightweight judoka like me could fight with a decisive, dynamic, strong and beautiful style of judo."
Most top Judo players have 3-5 techniques they can use at the top level. This means that you can deny them usable grips (which is what Takato did to Yang in the 60kg mens final) to render them ineffective.
Two days ago, in the 60kg men’s category for Judo, Naohisa Takato fought Yang Yung-wei in the finals and won Japan’s first gold of the Tokyo Olympics.
He won with zero scores. Yang simply had more penalties than he did.
My old coach was disappointed. But I wasn’t.
The Japanese attitude to Judo is that you want to win by ippon — the highest score possible. It is less ‘honourable’ to win ‘technically’, that is, to win by making your opponent commit more errors than you over the course of the match.
My old Sensei was trained in Japan.
So of course he thought it was a terrible match; Takato didn’t win decisively.
But the commentators, and my current coach, and perhaps even Kosei Inoue, Japan’s head coach, pretty much didn’t care. Modern Judo has a technical component to it. It’s just how the game is played.
One of the things I like to say is that you have to qualify for strategy.
Small companies usually die of incompetent operations, not lack of strategy, so you don’t get the luxury of thinking about strategy if you can’t execute.
Today someone pointed out to me that if you say “oh, that guy is terrible at strategy”, this is actually a compliment in disguise — it means their operations are decent enough that they get to qualify for strategy.
I realise that Hamilton Helmer (he of 7 Powers fame) says something like ‘operational excellence is table stakes’. I like that a lot.
“… 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.