Tag Archives: K. Anders Ericsson

Practice Outweighs Talent in Developing Expert Performance

Daniel Coyle

Journalist Daniel Coyle consolidated neuroscience research with stories of expert performers in The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How .
He distilled three principles that enable performance development across a variety of skills and fields:

• “Deep” Practice, which includes daily repetition for up to several hours, observation, and corrective feedback by an expert to develop the myelin of “muscle memory” and increase neural signal strength, speed and accuracy.
This practice must be characterized by focused attention to mimic expert performance, reduce errors, and willingness to practice at increasingly more challenging levels.

• Ignition, or commitment based on “unconscious desires” and “triggered by primal cues”

• Master Coaching, in which to expert teacher encourages “ignition” and “deep” practice with:

1. Task-specific knowledge explained with vivid examples and meaningful metaphors
2. Perceptive tailoring to each student’s skills and needs
3. “The GPS Reflex”, or providing timely, specific guidance
4. “Theatrical Honesty,” or ability to empathically connect with students

K Anders Ericsson

Related Posts review foundational research by K. Anders Ericsson, who suggested that expert performance requires “10000 hours of practice.”

Geoff Colvin

Talent is Overrated

Like Coyle, Geoff Colvin argues that Talent is Overrated and can be eclipsed by systematic practice with corrective coaching.

Paul Herr’s Primal Management: Unraveling the Secrets of Human Nature to Drive High Performance also argues that motivation in the workplace, as in Coyle’s broader discussion of performance and motivation, is based on the “evolutionary psychology” of “tribal survival” and includes:

Paul Herr

Self-Protection, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarch of higher-order needs
Abraham Maslow
Cooperation, collaborative work in groups fulfills people’s social desires to belong to a group working toward a shared goal
Skill deployment, opportunity to develop skills and experience satisfaction with progressive improvement
Competency, opportunity to demonstrate skills and receive social recognition for these improvements
Innovation, based on people’s curiosity and desire to make in processes, systems, ideas, events

-*How do you develop your talents?

-*Where do you find expert coaching?

-*How do you persist in “Deep Practice” even when it’s “no fun”?

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How Can Dance Inform Business Thinking?

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Peter Lovatt

Peter Lovatt founded the Dance Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire, which combines his performance experience as a professional dancer with his training as a research psychologist.

In several TED talks, he marvels at his career trajectory because he “was rubbish at school,” and was relegated to Special Education classes, probably due to his undiagnosed ADHD.

His career demonstrates an innovative synthesis of disciplines with his current research agenda investigating the impact of dance on problem solving using divergent thinking and convergent thinking strategies.

Peter Lovatt at TED

Lovatt’s experiments demonstrated that volunteers who engaged in improvised dance movements solved divergent thinking problems more quickly than when they performed more structured dance maneuvers, or no movement at all.

Similarly, his work showed these volunteers increased their speed of solving convergent thinking problems after they engaged in choreographed dance moves.

These findings may not imply that innovation teams should engage in structured and unstructured movements at work, but it does support the positive impact of dance movement on neural processing speed and problem solving.

Lovatt extended this work to patients with Parkinson’s disease, known to disrupt divergent thinking processes, to validate his findings with normal volunteers.
He demonstrated that Parkinson’s disease patients improved the divergent thinking problem solving after they engaged in improvised dance sequences, and hypothesized that these patients develop new neural pathways to “work around” dopamine-depleted blockages.

Peter Lovatt leading dance experiment

Lovatt’s group found increases in self-esteem among participants in dance styles that:

Include more improvisational elements (“high degree of tolerance for not getting it right”),
Are gender or culturally neutral
Raise the heart rate
Are repetitive
Encourage looser fitting clothes (in contrast to ballet)
Are non-competitive

Related Post on impact of dance:
Oxytocin Increases Empathic Work Relationships, Workplace Trust, Generosity

Twyla Tharp

MacArthur Fellowship and Tony Award-winning choreographer Twyla Tharp discussed innovation and collaboration through the lens of dance in two books with lessons applicable to business.

In The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life she asserts that creative expression requires perseverance, practice, hard work, “showing up,” and cultivating systematic habits to act upon innovative initiative.

This echoes the action-orientation advocated by Malcolm Gladwell in his observation of 10,000 hours of practice to develop virtuoso performance and by sports psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, summarized in these related posts:

Tharp’s The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together discusses both how collaboration can change the participants, and practical approaches to collaborative creation – which she acknowledges has not been completely smooth in some of her work with luminaries including Richard Avedon, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bob Dylan, Milos Forman, Norma Kamali, Frank Sinatra.
Two related posts on Collaboration are:

Dance provides a fresh perspective and metaphor for business challenges including problem solving, innovation, and collaboration.

-*How do you react to Lovatt’s and Tharp’s application of movement in problem solving, collaboration and innovation?

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Performance Excellence linked to Recognizing, Preventing, Correcting Failures — and Coaching

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Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande a Harvard Medical School professor, surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and New Yorker staff writer, investigated excellent performance across disciplines in search of ways to improve global medical care.
His findings suggest simple behavior changes, such as following a structured checklist, can avert poor performance and related negative outcomes.

In a recent talk at Harvard, he said, “people that were focused on achieving something more than competence…weren’t smarter than anybody else, they weren’t geniuses…Instead they seemed to …come to grips with their inherent fallibility—fallibility in the systems that they work in, and with what it took to overcome that fallibility.”

Gawande discusses three elements of better performance in Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance

Diligence – Attending to details, to avoid errors and overcome obstacles.
Gawande offers a rationale for checklists and principles for their optimal structuring in his The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
Doing Right –Ensuring that skill and will and incentives are aligned to drive excellent performance
Ingenuity – Deliberate, mindful monitoring of potential and actual failures, continuously seeking innovative ways to improve performance and solutions

All of these elements can be improved with attentive coaching observation and feedback

Gawande distinguishes making mistakes because we don’t:

Know enough (ignorance)
Make proper use of what we do already know (ineptitude)

He notes that because we have extensive access to information, ignorance occurs less frequently than ineptitude.
In addition, he argues that both can be improved by systematic analysis through tools such as checklists to detect, avert, and remedy failures.

Geoffrey Smart

The application of systematic checklist-based analysis was linked to Internal Rate of Return (IRR) in Geoffrey Smart’s study of investments by Venture Capital (VC) firms, The Art and Science of Human Capital Valuation

He described the VC firm’s approach to assessing the “human capital” that would lead new ventures in seven categories:

The Art Critic – The most frequently-used approach in which the VC assesses leadership talent at a glance, intuitively, based on extensive experience.
The Sponge – Conducts extensive due diligence, researching and assimilating information, then decides based on intuition
The Prosecutor – Interrogates the candidate, tests with challenging questions and hypothetical situations
The Suitor – Woos the candidate to accept the leadership role instead of analyzing capabilities and fit
The Terminator – Eliminates the evaluation because the venture is funded for the best ideas, not the originators, who are replaced
The Infiltrator – Becomes a “participant-observer” in an immersive, time-consuming experientially-based assessment
The Airline Captain – Uses a formal checklist to diligently study past mistakes, which rendered the top average Internal Rate of Return (IRR), 80%, in contrast to all others, which were 35% or less for all of the other types.
This approach had 10% likelihood of later having to fire senior management, whereas the others had at least 50% likelihood.

Smart said that Venture Capitalists said that two of their most important mistakes are:

Rushing to close a deal and investing insufficient time in analysis of the talent and the deal
Being influence by “halo effect”

Both Gawande and Smart present evidence for the value of systematic reminders to execute all elements required for expert performance, to prevent failure and alert to potential failure points.

-*How do you improve performance?
-*What value do you find in expert coaching?

See related posts on Performance Improvement:

Geoff Colvin

Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated and

Anders Ericcson’s Making of an Expert in The How and Who of Innovation

K. Anders Ericcson

Task structuring tools:

David Allen’s classic, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Six Apps to Increase Your Productivity

How and Who of Innovation

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Many innovation experts urge overcoming roadblocks by “doing something different”, and Alex Cornell joins the chorus in his Breakthrough!: Proven Strategies to Overcome Creative Block and Spark Your Imagination

In contrast, Tom Kelley offered more specific guidance in the stages of “how” innovation is managed at IDEO in
The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm:

•              Analyze the market, potential client groups, technology, and constraints for each innovation problem
•              Observe people in typical life situations
•              Visualize novel concepts and their intended customers
•              Evaluate and refine prototypes during rapid iterations
•              Implement new concept for commercialization

Steven Johnson offers seven non-linear principles of innovation in Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation:

• Adjacent possible: Timing is essential for innovation to be accepted

• Liquid networks: Connections between different disciplines to enable ideas development and implementation

• Slow hunch: Insights incubate, germinate over time before becoming executable

• Serendipity: Spontaneous, chance juxtaposition of ideas applied to other

• Error: Outcomes considered “failures” from numerous trials may lead to – and be required – to successfully implement ideas

• Exaptation: Reusing existing ideas, technologies for a different purpose

• Platforms: Adapting, recombining existing knowledge, components, implementation approaches to develop something new

Expert innovators seem to follow these guidelines and have developed skill through what Geoff Colvin calls “Deliberate Practice” in “What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else”, the sub-title of his book, Talent is Overrated.

He notes that Deliberate Practice is not considered “fun”, but is a highly demanding and repeated mental challenge, systematically designed to improve performance with consistent expert monitoring and feedback.

Colvin’s premise is based on K. Anders Ericsson’s classic Harvard Business Review article, “The Making of an Expert“, which outlines three contributors to superior performance across disciplines:

•             Deliberate Practice to improve existing skills and to extend the reach and range of skills
•             Expert coaching with consistent monitoring and corrective feedback
•              Support from family and mentors
Kelley of IDEO focused more recently on the “who” of innovation in The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Defeating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization, organized by Learning, Building, and Organizing capabilities:

•              Experience
•              Set Designer
•              Caregiver
•              Storyteller
•              Anthropologist
•              Cross-pollinator
•              Hurdler
•              Experimenter
•              Collaborator
•              Director
Meredith Belbin offered similar analysis of eight team roles in his Team Roles at Work and Management Teams: Why they succeed or fail to ignite collaborative strategy definition and execution.

These findings suggest that processes and practices can help shape innovation, but consistent, focused and attentive practice increases capacity to innovate more than “natural talent” — validating the well-known homespun advice to “work hard” and demonstrate a “strong work ethic.”

-*What processes and roles do you use to increase innovation at work?

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Developing a SMARTER Mindset for Resilience, Emotional Intelligence – Part 2

Kathryn Welds | Curated Research and Commentary

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