Experts think differently

Research on expertise has identiﬁed the following diﬀerences between expert performers and beginners

Experts have larger and more integrative knowledge units, and their representations of information are more functional and abstract than those of novices, whose knowledge base is more fragmentary. For example, a beginning piano player reads sheet music note by note, whereas a concert pianist is able to see the whole row or even several rows of music notation at the same time.
When solving problems, experts may spend more time on the initial problem evaluation and planning than novices. This enables them to form a holistic and in-depth understanding of the task and usually to reach a solution more swiftly than beginners.
Basic functions related to tasks or the job are automated in experts, whereas beginners need to pay attention to these functions. For instance, in a driving Basic functions related to tasks or the job are automated in experts, whereas beginners need to pay attention to these functions. For instance, in a driving school, a young driver focuses his or her attention on controlling devices and pedals, while an experienced driver performs basic strokes automatically. For this reason, an expert driver can observe and anticipate traﬃc situations better than a beginning driver.
Experts outperform novices in their metacognitive and reﬂective thinking. In other words, they make sharp observations of their own ways of thinking, acting, and working, especially in non-routine situations when auto mated activities are challenged. Beginners’ knowledge is mainly explicit and they are dependent on learned rules. In addition to explicit knowledge, experts have tacit or implicit knowledge that accumulates with experience. This kind of knowledge makes it possible to make fast decisions on the basis of what is often called intuition.
In situations where something has gone wrong or when experts face totally new problems but are not required to make fast decisions, they critically reﬂect on their actions. Unlike beginners, experienced professionals focus their thinking not only on details but rather on the totality consisting of the details.
Experts’ thinking is more holistic than the thinking of novices. It seems that the quality of thinking is associated with the quality and amount of knowledge. With a fragmentary knowledge base, a novice in any ﬁeld may remain on lower levels of thinking: things are seen as black and white, without any nuances. In contrast, more experienced colleagues with a more organized and holistic knowledge base can access more material for their thinking, and, thus, may begin to explore diﬀerent perspectives on matters and develop more relativistic views concerning certain problems. At the highest levels of thinking, an individual is able to reconcile diﬀerent perspectives, either by forming a synthesis or by integrating diﬀerent approaches or views.

Level	Performance
Beginner	Follows simple directions
Novice	Performs using memory of facts and simple rules
Competent	Makes simple judgmentsfor typical tasksMay need help withcomplex or unusual tasksMay lack speed andflexibility
Proficient	Performance guided by deeper experience Able to figure out the most critical aspects of a situation Sees nuances missed by less-skilled performers Flexible performance
Expert	Performance guided by extensive practice and easily retrievable knowledge and skillsNotices nuances, connections, and patterns Intuitive understanding based on extensive practice Able to solve difficult problems, learn quickly, and find needed resources

Levels of Performance

Sources

Clark, R. 2003. Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement, 2nd ed. Silver Spring, MD: International Society for Performance Improvement.
Ericsson, K.A. 2016. Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Kallio, E, ed. Development of Adult Thinking : Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cognitive Development and Adult Learning. Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.

Emotional Intelligence and Critical Thinking

Research from Tony Anderson and David James Robertson, outlined in The Conversation, suggests people with higher emotional intelligence can recognize misinformation better.

There is growing evidence, including outlined above, that emotional intelligence has a huge impact of critical thinking. Emotional intelligence is the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships.

The evidence indicates that emotional intelligence helps us navigate uncertainty by regulating the emotional turmoil from a decision and the stress around it and reduce tendency to fall to biases.

Emotional Intelligence aspects of social awareness and empathy further enlighten the decision maker’s situational awareness.

Sources

Carmeli, A., & Josman, Z. E. (2006). The relationship among emotional intelligence, task performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors. Human Performance, 19, 403–419. doi:10.1207/s15327043hup1904_5
Miao, C., Humphrey, R. H., & Qian, S. (2017). A meta-analysis of emotional intelligence effects on job satisfaction mediated by job resources, and a test of moderators. Personality and Individual Differences, 116, 281–288. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2017.04.031
Mount, M., Ilies, R., & Johnson, E. (2006). Relationship of personality traits and counterproductive work behaviors: The mediating effects of job satisfaction. Personnel Psychology, 59, 591–622. doi:10.1111/peps.2006.59.issue-3
Spector, P. E., & Fox, S. (2002). An emotion-centered model of voluntary work behavior: Some parallels between counterproductive work behavior and organizational citizenship behavior. Human Resource Management Review, 12(2002), 269–292. doi:10.1016/S1053-4822(02)00049-9

Whiteboards as Artifacts

In “An Ode to the Whiteboard, Corporate America’s Least Appreciated Office Tool” Rob Walker says “And even for more workaday whiteboards, there’s an additional factor that the pandemic era has actually underscored: the value and appeal of whiteboarding as an analog, tactile experience.”

He then goes on to compare the whiteboard to a campfire, a gathering place that drives collaboration and creativity.

Whiteboards are a great visual artifact of quality culture.

Whiteboard are shared spaces for problem-solving and innovation.

They form an important part of visual management.

Share your thoughts on whiteboards in the comments!

Visual Management

In the organizational world Visual Management is a management system that attempts to improve organizational performance through connecting and aligning organizational vision, core values, goals and culture with other management systems, work processes, workplace elements, and stakeholders, by means of stimuli, which directly address one or more of the five human senses (sight, hearing, feeling, smell and taste). These stimuli communicate quality information (necessary, relevant, correct, immediate, easy to-understand and stimulating), which helps people make sense of the organizational context at a glance by merely looking around. It is a management approach that utilizes either one or more of information giving, signaling, limiting or guaranteeing (mistake-proofing/ poka-yoke) visual devices to communicate with “doers”, so that places become self-explanatory, self-ordering, self-regulating and self-improving.

Function	Definition	Replaces the Practice of
Transparency	The ability of a process (or its parts) to communicate with people through organizational and physical means, measurements, and public display of information Transparency stimulates people to move outside the confines of particular job responsibilities and to see the larger scale of their work	Information held in people‟s minds and on the shelves.
Discipline	Making a habit of properly maintaining correct procedures by transforming the abstract concept of discipline into directly observable concrete practices Address the six basic questions (the what, the where, the who, the how, the how many and the when)	Warning, scolding, inflicting punishments, dismissing etc.
Continuous Improvement	Focused and sustained incremental innovation Makes organizational learning visual with high ability to respond to people’s ideas	Static organizations or big improvement leaps through considerable investment.
Job Facilitation	Conscious attempt to physically and/or mentally ease people’s efforts on routine, already known tasks, by offering various visual aids	Expecting people to perform well at their jobs without providing them any aids.
On-the-Job Training	Learning from experience or integrating working with learning.	Conventional training practices or offering no training.
Creating Shared Ownership	A feeling of possessiveness and being psychologically tied to the objectives	Management dictation for change efforts, vision and culture creation.
Management by Facts	Use of facts and data based on statistics	Management by subjective judgement or vague terms.
Simplification	Constant efforts on monitoring, processing, visualizing and distributing system wide information for individuals and teams	Expecting people to monitor, process and understand the complex system wide information on their own.
Unification	Partly removing the boundaries and creating empathy within an organization through effective information sharing	Fragmentation or “this is not my job” behavior

The functions of Visual Management

Three year retrospective

This blog is three years old and my experiences as a practitioner of quality and as a leader has been driven during this time by narrative writing. Writing gives the space and time to look back, re-live and re-experience, and ultimately reflect upon our work. Writing these blog posts is an effective way of digesting experience on the job. Through
writing this blog I have attempted to understand situations from various viewpoints and perspectives.

I get asked a lot why I do this, and how I make time for writing. Let’s be honest, there are long periods of time where I do not. But when I do make the time it is for these reasons.

Writing as a catalyst for reflective thought

In an era where lifelong professional learning is continuously promoted, professionals need to continuously learn and take the role of practitioner-researcher. The narrative writing I engage in on this blog plays an important role that aids this ongoing development. Through writing I enhance my reflective awareness.

Writing helps reduce the imbalance I feel between theory and practice. Too often we need to make immediate decisions and it is difficult to balance what-must-happen with what-should-happen. Writing this blog allows me to think critically about my past actions and how these together with theory can inform future practice.

Writing this blog is a way of thinking that helps me in understanding myself; my own actions; my thoughts; my emotions; my experiences. Apart from self-understanding, self-reflective narrative also assists professional learning because it aids professional thinking. In short, writing helps me think, reflect, and develop. I write, therefore I think.

First-order narratives: promoting self-understanding

The narratives in this blog are first-order narratives where I write about my own experiences, as opposed to second-order narratives where the author writes about the experiences of others. Everything I write starts as a challenge or an experience I am processing. This blog rarely engages in journalistic reporting, and when it does report on the news it is always part of reflection.

Through writing about my experiences as a quality professional, and reflecting on them, I strive to construct meanings, interpretations, new knowledge and understandings.

By engaging in systematic reflection I am promoting questioning, and questioning encourages me to think of new possibilities. This is where ideas come from, and this drives my professional quality practice forward.

Conversing with oneself

Conversing with someone else offers the possibility of feedback and exposure to different viewpoints. This is why I look to professional societies as one way to enhance my work. I’ll be honest though that is not as easy as I would like it to be.

Unfortunately, I often feel isolated. People are busy and it is difficult to carve out the time for reflection and discussion. It can often feel that collaboration and sharing about non-project deliverables are limited to non-existent at worst. By blogging I am conversing with myself in public. It would be great to engage in dialogue with people, but I feel this public dialogue is a way to engage with the larger body of knowledge.

I think this is one of the reasons I blogged less after starting my current job. All my time was going into collaborative narratives as I strove to determine what came next in this new role.

Looking deeper into issues

Sitting down and writing a blog post offers time for reflective thought. Sure, I talk about these issues all day, but writing journal entries, because I tend to think about it a lot more, allows me to explore additional dimensions of the issue. Narrative writing affords me the space for focused reflective thinking. This blog is my medium for reflection, questioning, critical analysis, thinking, reasoning, and the building of arguments.

Often I write in preparation for some task or project. Or to analyze how it is progressing and to solve problems.

Creating causal links

A narrative should have an evaluative function; offering valuable information about how the author interprets and connects meanings to lived situations and experiences. A narrative must add up to something; it is more than the sum
of its parts. Through writing this blog I am connecting the various parts of quality that are important to me in a wider whole. And by crafting that whole, develop new learnings to apply.

Blogging is tiring but valuable

I have experienced periods of tiredness, frustration, and a lessened motivation to blog, and this resonates with the argument that practitioners are usually so busy that they have little time for their own writing. This has especially been true during the last year of this pandemic.

However, I strongly view this blog as a core part of my learning, and that learning benefits from the longitudinal process of blogging. Writing about my experiences as a quality professional has promoted detailed observations of my work, analysis of that work, imagined solutions, implementation of such imagined solutions, and re-analysis of alterations to practice. Writing this blog has been an ideal way of showing experiential learning and my own development.

What comes next?

I set myself a goal of writing at least one post a day in March, and I found that amazingly rewarding. Not sure if I can keep that pace up but I am committed to continuing to use this blog space for reflection and development. I hope folks find some use out of that, and I look forward to the various communities this space engenders.