#039 Leadership beyond deliberate practice
Hello,
Welcome to The Future Of Leadership, an approximately monthly newsletter packed full of leadership wisdom for CEOs and senior technology executives.
The Myth of Deliberate Practice & Mastery >> was the most clicked link in last month's newsletter. I unpack why deliberate practice works well in 'kind' learning environments (like sports, chess and learning languages, or maths) but is far less effective in 'wicked' learning environments, of the kind we have to navigate in business and leadership.
Accelerating Executive Mastery >>
My latest article goes even deeper on deliberate practice, to explore its usefulness specifically for developing business and leadership skills. Click the link below to read it:
Leadership beyond deliberate practice >>
Deliberate practice involves repetitive practice of challenging tasks, continuous feedback, and a structured effort to go beyond current abilities. For a long time it has been the Gold Standard for honing expertise and mastery, but it has increasingly come under scrutiny, for all the reasons I dive into in The Myth of Deliberate Practice & Mastery >>
It turns out that a defining difference between 'kind' and 'wicked' learning environments is feedback, or rather the rate at which we receive it, its accuracy, or, in some cases, whether we receive it all.
That's why deliberate practice works well in the earlier stages of our management and leadership journeys, where we can use it to build our base, technical skills in things like presenting and public speaking, giving feedback, holding effective meetings, financial analysis and learning programming. These are all largely learnable activities, about which we can receive feedback in seconds, minutes and hours, and adjust course as necessary.
But what if you’re a senior leader navigating challenges that are devoid of rapid feedback? What if it takes months, quarters, or years to receive? What if the feedback is ambiguous, misplaced, or you just never get it at all? Now you’re operating in a very different environment. For example, it's hard to see how deliberate practice will help you know whether your strategy for the next year is the right one, lead an organisational restructure, decide whether you've allocated enough to the exploratory Artifical Intelligence budget for this year, or make the really hard decision about whether to let a senior member of your team go?
These types of wicked, systemic, complex challenges can’t be mastered with technical skills and intellectual horsepower alone. So, what can you do? Start by reading Leadership beyond deliberate practice >> and head to Accelerating Executive Mastery >> for much more, as this is exactly what I'm exploring.
What I'm reading
I'm part-way into The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist.
It explores the relationship between the two hemispheres of the human brain (though not through the pop-science 'left brain / right brain' lens) and how their differing ways of perceiving and interpreting the world have shaped Western culture and history. McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere, which is analytical, detail-oriented, and focused on narrow aspects of reality, has become dominant in modern society, overshadowing the right hemisphere's broader, more holistic perspective that appreciates context, meaning, and connections.
I was struck by how closely the book's key themes aligned with the craft of leadership, in particular the need to lead at a 'necessary distance' - to be both simultaneously on the on the dancefloor and the balcony - and the ideas of horizontal and vertical development that I often discuss with clients and in this newsletter:
"The defining features of the human condition can all be traced to our ability to stand back from the world, from ourselves and from the immediacy of experience. This enables us to plan, to think flexibly and inventively, and, in brief, to take control of the world around us rather than simply respond to it passively.
This distance, this ability to rise above the world in which we live, has been made possible by the evolution of the frontal lobes. Clearly we have to inhabit the world of immediate bodily experience, the actual terrain in which we live, and where our engagement with the world takes place alongside our fellow human beings, and we need to inhabit it fully. Yet at the same time we need to rise above the landscape in which we move, so that we can see what one might call the territory. To understand the landscape we need both to go out into the felt, lived world of experience as far as possible, along what one might think of as the horizontal axis, but also to rise above it, on the vertical axis.
There is an optimal degree of separation between ourselves and the world we perceive, if we are to understand it, much as there is between the reader's eye and the page: too much and we cannot make out what is written, but, equally, too little and we cannot read the letters at all. This necessary distance as we might call it (it turns out to be crucial to the story unfolding in this book), is not the same as detachment. Distance can yield detachment, as when we coldly calculate how to outwit our opponent, by imagining what he believes will be our next move. It enables us to exploit and use. But what is less often remarked is that, in total contrast, it also has the opposite effect. By standing back from the animal immediacy of our experience we are able to be more empathic with others, who we come to see, for the first time, as beings like ourselves. The frontal lobes not only teach us to betray, but to trust. Through them we learn to take another's perspective and to control our own immediate needs and desires".
Other resources I enjoyed and shared with clients this month:
How listening in to our bodies can make us more Fit for Complexity - "Let’s start with the notion that our body’s most basic job is to keep us alive. When we are under physical threat, it automatically moves into action to keep us safe through one of four innate responses: flee, fight, freeze, or appease. These are all well-adapted responses when our lives are in danger. In fact, if our bodies were not programmed this way, the human race would have died off long ago. The problem is that, as far as our bodies are concerned, an identity threat feels the same as physical threat. So when it’s our core sense of who we are - our fundamental “okay-ness” - rather than our actual life that’s under threat, our bodies react in much the same ways. Except that in these cases, the automatic responses aren’t always so well-adapted to the situation. Rather than being helpful, our bodies’ automatic responses are often anti-helpful".
Performing a Project Premortem - "Projects fail at a spectacular rate. One reason is that too many people are reluctant to speak up about their reservations during the all-important planning phase. By making it safe for dissenters who are knowledgeable about the undertaking and worried about its weaknesses to speak up, you can improve a project’s chances of success".
If you're a CEO, senior leader, or People-lead exploring development for your leaders and would like to explore working together, then get in touch.
Until next month,
