Agenda
Practice is essential. To be good at anything, you must practice. We know this about virtually every area of human development. To be good at the piano or excel in athletics, you must practice.
To perform cardiovascular surgery, or fly an aircraft, you must practice. Anything that people do well requires practice. But, it’s not just any old lackluster practice that makes a difference. There is practice, and then there is effective practice. In this section we’ll talk about the current scholarship around game changing, deliberate practice.
Few SMEs know what exactly what they should be practicing or how. Most SMEs, to their credit, do their jobs the best they can. Through repetition and experience, they learn and improve. This eventually makes them a little better here and better there. Few SMEs, however, are systematic or methodical about practicing in their role as an SME. We need to change that.
Practice can make a big difference. If you deploy the principles of deliberate practice we outline here, you will become far better as an SME. Not just a little better, a lot better. It was Edward Thorndike, a Columbia University professor at the end of the 19th century who put it this way, "When one sets oneself zealously to improve any ability, the amount gained is astonishing."
Before his death in 2021, Ander Ericsson was a long-time researcher of expertise and expert performance. Early in his career, he was teaching at Carnegie Mellon University where he performed a simple test. He asked a few students to remember random numbers as they were read. He read a series of digits at a rate of one per second and then asked the student to repeat the numbers back. Seven … four … zero … one … one … nine and so on. Dr. Ericsson knew that humans have a natural limit of 6 or 7 digits.
Rarely can people hear and repeat 9 or 10 random digits with reliability. It seemed to many scientists that this limit was purely biological. But Ericsson wondered if people could push the limits and do much better. One student, it turned out, could. After several weeks of strategizing and practicing, one of Ericsson’s students successfully repeated back a string of 82 random digits.
As of 2021, the world record for repeating random digits spoken at 1 digit per second is held by Lance Tschirhart at 456 digits. That’s listening to random numbers for more than seven-and-a-half minutes and repeating them back in order.
Ericsson's research at Carnegie Mellon, and other similar research, has revealed that otherwise normal people can accomplish extraordinary expertise and expert performance with the right type and quantity of practice. Ericsson said, "No matter what field you study, … the most effective types of practices all follow the same set of general principles."
In their book, "PEAK, Secrets from the new science of expertise" Ericsson and co-auther Robert Pool outline and support seven principles of what they call, “Deliberate Practice” which is accepted by many as the highest form of practicing. This is the gold standard for developing peak performance.
Regardless of the discipline, be it basketball or golf, painting or poetry, software development or heart surgery, the principles of deliberate practice are the same.
First, don’t reinvent the wheel. Learn from the people, and stand on the shoulders of the people who have gone before you.Deliberate practice develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established. Don’t just learn from people who know how to do something well, learn from people who know how to transfer the desired skill.
Second, push your development beyond your comfort zone. We grow most when we go beyond the edge of our comfort zone.We must constantly try things that are beyond our current abilities. Pushing yourself beyond your natural ability is normally not enjoyable, but it is effective at developing exceptional skill. Watch yourself on video, for example. You may not like what you see, but you will almost certainly learn something about yourself.
Number 3: Set specific goals to improve in targeted aspects of your performance. Improvement does not occur in generalities. It must be narrow and focused. If you want to improve at archery and hit distant targets reliably you need to practice many individual skills that contribute to that goal. Great archers are experts at managing and tuning their equipment. They are consistent, steady, and strong in their draw and hold. They release in exactly the same way each time. Each sub-task requires specific goals and practice.
Fourth, Deliberate practice is deliberate. It requires your full attention. It isn't enough to go through the motions of practice. Full mental engagement is essential to changing the neural connections that are essential for expert development. The mind is a curious instrument. It is flexible and adaptive. Drastic improvements occur when the mind is fully engaged.
Practice must include feedback and modifications. There is no sense in repeatedly doing something wrong. Early in process, much of the feedback should come from teachers or coaches, who will monitor progress, point out problems, and offer ways to address those problems. With time and experience, however, experts must learn to monitor themselves, spot mistakes, and adjust accordingly. Self-monitoring requires a strong understanding of what ideal performance looks like.
Which brings us to the sixth principle of deliberate practice: mental models. You must be able to see something mentally before you can produce it physically. Deliberate practice both produces and depends on effective mental representations. As one's performance improves, the representations become more detailed and effective, in turn making it possible to improve even more. Mental representations show the right way to do something and allow one to notice when something is wrong. Fixing problems is the byproduct of effective mental models. Deliberate Practice asks what does high performance look like and what adjustments are needed to reliably deliver at the highest level?
Finally, at some point, in order to develop your expertise you must be able to get off one track of behavior and get on another. You must be willing to depart from one way of doing something, when another way is clearly superior. Deliberate practice nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired knowledge and skills.
While practice has always been seen as an essential ingredient to developing knowledge and skill. The principles of Deliberate Practice, including the seven points outlined here, have been proven time and again to be the most effective.
Researchers at the University of Colorado, for example, have shown that deliberate practice produces results that are dramatically better (2.5 standard deviations better) than traditional forms of practice. The application of Deliberate Practice will vary across disciplines. An information security professional will practice his/her craft much differently than a medical device solution consultant. The approach, however, to deliberate practice should be the same.
