8/ My question to you:
Where are the widely-established management training techniques?
What is the pedagogy?
Who are your coaches?
How do you get good timely feedback?
How do you focus?
Oh, you can't answer these questions? Then you can't do DP. Let's try another one.
Conversation
9/ You want to get good at investing.
Where are the well-established investment training techniques?
Who has done pedagogical development?
Coaches?
How do you get good feedback?
What are your well-defined, specific goals?
You don't have good answers? No DP for you.
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10/ Try asking these questions for many of the skills you might want to get good at in your career:
- Getting good at organisational politics.
- Negotiating deals for your company.
- Developing code 'taste' when building large software systems.
- Inventing new marketing methods.
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11/ How do you get good at all of these things? Not by DP, for sure.
In fact, even WITHIN the domain of music, researchers admit that good pop musicians and jazz folk do not do DP to get good! Only classical musicians do so.
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12/ In Peak, Ericsson sort of does a cop-out and says "ok, so maybe you can't do DP in your domain, but you can use the PRINCIPLES of DP!"
Sure. But DP assumes good, clean feedback, and many real world skills don't have that. Leadership, say. Or portfolio construction.
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13/ And so this is the dirty little secret of the deliberate practice literature. It was built on top of bounded skill domains with already well-established training methods. Things like chess, and music, and tennis and math!
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14/ Implication: if you are in a messy skill domain with no well-established training methods — like MOST OF THE SKILL DOMAINS IN YOUR CAREER — you can't do DP.
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15/ Now, there is an interesting catch. It's totally possible for a skill domain to experience pedagogical development — that is, for coaches and practitioners to discover, establish and share a body of tested training methods.
Suddenly DP becomes possible for that domain.
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16/ But this is really hard. And the skills required for pedagogical development are different from the skills required to get good at the domain.
It's likely you don't have time for that, especially if you just want to get good at your career.
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17/ So what do you do? Well, you look for alternative training methods.
Like a learning theory that teaches you how to learn better from your experiences:
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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?
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18/ Or a body of work that allows you to extract tacit mental models of expertise from the heads of experts around you:
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19/ None of this is new, and anyone who's followed my writing/experimentations with DP would be familiar with the arguments here.
The next time you find someone recommending Deliberate Practice, ask them what domain they're speaking of, and what they know of the practice.
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20/ It's likely they haven't actually tried using it. If they did, they would know how difficult it is to do. And they would have come to grips with the core limitations of the theory itself.
The end.
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21/ Follow if you'd like more threads like this. I mostly write about expertise in the context of making better business and career decisions. But in a 'let's actually try to put this to practice' sense.
Also, my newsletter: commoncog.com/blog/subscribe
Thank you for reading!
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