In the spirit of disclosure, I may have referenced this one once or twice, but I think it is essential to know exactly what the research says when we talk about deliberate practice, a topic I end to be passionate about.
Scott Young “The 10,000-Hour Rule is a Myth.”
Our organizations are either growing or they’re dying. The key thing that drives growth in organizations is when their employees are learning. To strengthen our organizations, our teams, ourselves we need to ensure our culture allows people to be exposed to new and challenging opportunities to learn.
We learn constantly. Most of that learning, however, is incremental, improvements that build on what we already know and do. We expand our knowledge and refine our skills in ways that strengthen our identities and commitments. This process sharpens competence and broadens expertise, and is key in building subject matter experts.
Incremental learning can allow people to grow in a workplace until they reach the limit on their resources for new learning – think of it as an S-curve. Eventually, there isn’t enough opportunities to learn. Furthermore, learning that broadens our expertise is valuable, but it is not enough. Incremental learning does not alter the way we see others, the world, and ourselves.
The second type of learning is called transformative, it changes our perspectives laying the foundations for growth and innovative leaps.
Both kinds of learning are necessary. Incremental learning helps us deliver, while transformative learning helps us develop. Both are necessary, but too often we allow incremental learning to be haphazard and make no space for transformative learning.
In both cases we need to build spaces to drive learning.
We often see incremental in our training programs, while transformative is critical for culture building.
| Incremental Learning | Transformative Learning | |
| Good for | Knowledge and Skills | Purpose and Presence |
| Source of Learning | Experts (models) | Experience (moments) |
| Work required | Deliberate Practice | Reflective engagement |
| Aim of process | New action (a better way) | New meaning (a better why) |
| Role of others | Focusing practice | Inviting Interpretation |
References
If you work in teams, chances are you use brainstorming, gathering face-to-face in groups so that everyone can share ideas. This technique has been around since the late 1930s and many in quality and excellence pursuits view it as an effective technique.
Unfortunately, the science I’ve read is not quite in agreement. A group of four people typically generates approximately half as many ideas as a nominal group of four does. Production blocking, and a few other problems, lead to some key deficiencies in brainstorming:
Overcoming production blocking requires the use of additional tools, such as brainwriting. Brainwriting encompasses the sharing of ideas through pieces of paper – usually having people write their ideas out on post-it notes for example. This technique makes brainstorming effective by overcoming the problem of verbal brainstorming. Though their seems to be some worry here about social cues kicking in, and there may be more benefit in having folks write all their ideas on one piece of paper, or better yet on their own before the meeting.
Brain writing, to be truly effective, requires solid collaborative evaluation process to follow the idea generation phase this is the foundation of decision quality. The research seems to indicate we see results better than the norm with this combination.
This appears to be an area where more research is needed to examine different variations , the boundary conditions for demonstrating the superiority of brainwriting over nominal groups, the optimum size of the group, and the potential of mixing verbal and nonverbal brainstorming. If anyone knows of good studies in this area, please point me to them.
Subject matter experts have explicit knowledge from formal education and embedded in reports, manuals, websites, memos, and other corporate documents. But their implicit and tacit knowledge, based on their experience, is perhaps the source of their greatest value — whether the subject-matter expert with decades of experience who is lightning fast with a diagnosis and almost always spot-on or the manager whose team everyone wants to be on because she’s so good at motivating and mentoring.
Experts, no matter the domain, tend to have very similar attributes. Understanding these attributes allows us to start understanding how we build expertise.
| Dimension | Experts Demonstrate |
| Cognitive | |
| Critical know-how and “know-what” | Managerial, technical, or both; superior, experience-based techniques and processes; extraordinary factual knowledge |
| System thinking | Knowing interdependencies, anticipating consequences, understanding interactions |
| Judgement | Rapid, wise decision making |
| Context Awareness | Ability to take context into account |
| Pattern Recognition | Swift recognition of a phenomenon, situation, or process that has been encountered before |
| Behavioral | |
| Networking (“Known-who”) | Building and maintaining an extensive network of professionally important individuals |
| Interpersonal | Ability to deal with individuals, including motivating and leading them; comfort with intellectual disagreement |
| Communication | Ability to construct, tailor, and deliver messages through one or more media to build logical and persuasive arguments |
| Diagnosis and cue seeking | Ability to actively identify cues in a situation that would confirm or challenge a familiar pattern; ability to distinguish signal from noise |
| Physical | |
| Sensory | Ability to diagnose, interpret, or predict through appropriate senses |
One of the critical parts of being a subject matter expert is being able to help others absorb knowledge and gain wisdom through learn-by-doing techniques— guided practice, observation, problem solving, and experimentation.
Think of this as an apprenticeship program that provides deliberate practice with expert feedback, which is fundamental to the development of expertise.
Do your organizations have this sort of organized way to train an expert? How does it work?
annex 11 ASQ ASTM E2500 change control change management collaboration communication computer system lifecycle conference contamination control cqv cultural excellence data integrity decision making decision quality Ethics expertise fda ICH knowledge management leadership learning culture metrics Problem solving process psychological safety quality culture quality intelligence quality systems regulatory regulatory inspections regulatory state resilience risk assessment risk management root cause analysis speaking system design system thinking team Team excellence training transparency validation warning letter
I started this blog as an exercise in deliberate practice, as well as reflective. In order to grow it is important to engage in critical reflection, which requires a process of mutual learning, a consciously organised process of deliberative and distributed reflection. Which is what I strive to do in my blog posts.
At the end of last year, I evaluated my blog goals through an ACORN exercise, as well as updating a SWOT. These stand up pretty well, even in a year of changes where I took on member leader responsibilities as the chair of the ASQ’s Team and Workplace Excellence Forum and took a new job.
I met my posting goal, which was 1.5 posts a week, with 81 posts and 33.5k words.
The top 5 posts of 2019 are:
Looking ahead to 2020 for the blog, I am going to take a bit of direction from Luigi Sille who set the following goals for himself:
For building expertise, I want to continue to focus on building tools and methods to: deal with subjectivity and uncertainty around decision making and risk management; proactively build a culture of quality and excellence, especially dealing with aspects of data integrity; and, find connections between the larger organizational/leadership/operational bodies of work and adapt them to the quality profession.
This blog is a large part of growing my network and I want to get to 2 blog posts a week consistently. I’ll continue to work with the ASQ as chair of the Team and Workplace Excellence Forum, including holding at least 2 events (including an unconference!). I am also trying to pull together a group of speakers to bring data integrity and quality culture as a stream to ASQ BosCon. I’ll speak at least 2 ASQ Conferences. I’ll also deepen some ties with the PDA, including speaking at one conference.
As I continuously work to improve, I will bring the topics I’m learning and implementing back to this blog.
Investigations of a Dog 