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.
Instead, in most real world domains we care about — messy domains like business and investment and careers — the right question to ask is: how do we get better at trial and error?
in other words, what we need is a learning theory for how people do better trial and error!
The glib response to “what is the equivalent of deliberate practice in your field” is “I sensemake (reflect on my experiences) better and more aggressively and more thoroughly than my peers.”
Oh, and: “I actively search for better methods to double check my mental models, because I know the better I get at this game, the better able I become to deceive myself.”
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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?
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.