13/ Ok, here's an example. Trigger warning: Afghanistan, IEDs, military. Skip ahead if necessary.
After 9/11 the US military had problems with IEDs. These were roadside bombs. Think: Hurt Locker. The DoD started spending a lot of money to detect and defeat IEDs.
Conversation
14/ As part of that effort, the DoD commissioned a CTA. Apparently some of the Marines and Soldiers were able to detect IEDs. They would 'have a bad feeling', and take measures to avoid a danger zone.
The military wanted to know how. If they could extract, they could train.
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15/ The group of NDM researchers quickly realised this was a bloody difficult skill domain. Think about it: Iraq is large. Within Iraq, different towns and even neighbourhoods had different IED tactics. And Afghanistan was different still.
Plus the enemy was constantly adapting.
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16/ And they needed to extract something general. Something that would work regardless of where a young Marine was deployed.
Eventually they realised that the most skilled Marines were putting themselves in the insurgent's shoes.
They could think like an IED emplacer.
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17/ Think about it: if you wanted to emplace an IED, how would you trigger it? Say you trigger wirelessly. You would need a spotter. You would need to know when the Marine convoy was near enough to the bomb.
So the insurgents would use a marker. Like a pole, or a rock formation.
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18/ These were the cues the Marines were picking up on.
The researchers had successfully extracted this mental model of expertise. Now: how to train?
Ask yourself this: would you set up a Powerpoint presentation? A lecture of IED tactics?
That would be dumb.
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19/ Here's what the researchers did: they took a video game that the military used for training (called VBS) and built a module for it.
The players had to play AS an insurgent.
They had to emplace IEDs and target blue team convoys. This is what one of the researchers said:
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20/ Note how rapid the training could be. Note how quickly you could enable the construction of the actual mental model.
Eventually, Marines and Soldiers would play a few scenarios before deployment. It saved lives.
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21/ Let's wrap up. I've described an accelerated expertise training program, developed by applied researchers in military and industry contexts.
It is remarkably novel. I've written about some of the underlying theories before:
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So I’m just starting on Accelerated Expertise and my god is this a heavy lift.
I’m going to leave these book screenshots here and see if anyone picks up on the bombshell implications.
Show this thread
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22/ And it's just scratching the surface. For a full summary, including some other uses of the research, read my blog post here:
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23/ Follow for more threads about expertise, business decision making, and so on.
Or subscribe to my newsletter if you don't want to miss out on longform essays here: commoncog.com/blog/subscribe
Thank you for reading!
Replying to
PS: If you want to learn CTA, you may sign up for a course here: cta.institute
It's run by the OG researchers who invented some of the techniques. 😊
One of them was involved with the IED project.
I've signed up, and I encourage you to do so too!
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