#038 The Myth of Deliberate Practice & Mastery
Hello,
Welcome to The Future Of Leadership, an approximately monthly newsletter packed full of leadership wisdom for CEOs and senior technology executives.
Accelerating Executive Mastery: 10 ways to get better, faster >> was the most clicked in last month's newsletter.
Accelerating Executive Mastery >>
My latest piece of writing is The Myth of Deliberate Practice & Mastery >>
First coined by Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, and popularised by Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, deliberate practice is a focused and systematic approach to improving skills and achieving expertise.
It involves repetitive practice of challenging tasks, continuous feedback, and a structured effort to go beyond current abilities. Deliberate practice is about pushing the boundaries of one’s capabilities and addressing weaknesses.
The problem is that the self-help literature, and even Ericsson himself, latched on to deliberate practice as a way for improving at anything. According to one guru “regardless of where we choose to apply ourselves, deliberate practice can help us maximize our potential”.
It sounds enticing, but it’s not that straightforward. Deliberate practice won’t necessarily help you achieve mastery regardless of where you choose to apply yourself.
Deliberate practice only works well in kind learning environments - which include sports, disciplines like chess, and subjects like learning languages or maths. It’s not that some of these pursuits aren’t tough, requiring outstanding levels of grit, determination and resilience to perform at the highest levels, but the rules of the game are fixed, the outcomes of actions are evident and feedback is fast and clear.
Deliberate practice works less well in wicked learning environments - which include business, leadership and anything involving interpersonal dynamics like organizational design and culture, trading and investing, economics and Central Banking! In these environments the rules of the game aren’t fixed and might not be decided by you, feedback is delayed, inaccurate or misleading, making it hard to learn from actions.
"The world does not play fair. Instead of providing us with clear information that would enable us to ‘know’ better, it presents us with messy data that are random, incomplete, unrepresentative, ambiguous, inconsistent, unpalatable, or secondhand".
How We Know What Isn’t So, by Thomas Gilovich
None of which is to say that deliberate practice can't be helpful for building a base of technical business and leadership skills, but for navigating the challenges that senior leaders face it’s of less value. Fortunately, that's exactly why I'm writing my Series on Accelerating Executive Mastery >>, to help you be your very best in complex, wicked learning environments.
What I'm reading
Everything is Predictable: How Bayes' Remarkable Theorem Explains the World, by Tom Chivers, is a book about the famous mathematical formula first articulated by Reverend Thomas Bayes in the late 1700s.
Bayes Theorem is used to update the probability of a hypothesis based on new evidence. For example, what's the probability that it will rain on a given day in London? Probably about 0.4: there are around 150 rainy days a year in London. But if you look out the window and you see that the clouds are dark and heavy. What's the probability now? I don't know exactly, but it's higher: the probability of rain given that it's dark and cloudy is higher.
Bayes Theorem combines your initial belief (prior probability) with the new evidence (likelihood) to give a revised belief (posterior probability). Essentially, it’s a way to refine your guesses about the world as you learn more.
Why is this interesting? Well, given what we think we know about mental models and how the brain works, it has some interesting connotations for experienced leaders:
"It explains why, as we get older, we get more set in our ways. When we're young, we have very little data about the world, so our priors are weak and new information can shift them easily. We can learn quickly because we don't have a very precise model of the world that makes good predictions. As we get older, though, we gain more information, we get a richer, more precise model of the world, and new information must logically shift our priors less. So older people (to quote Karl Friston) are "wise, but inflexible". You can predict the world much more accurately when you're older, as long as the world doesn't change. But if the world does change, you need much more information in order to shift your pre-existing beliefs".
Other resources I enjoyed and shared with clients this month:
We won't be happy WHEN. We could be happy NOW - "If we're sufficiently smart, dedicated, hard-working, and lucky, we begin to accomplish goals and experience success. And while winning is better than losing in any number of ways, we ultimately learn that success does not, in fact, "make everything all right." As my client once said, "The feeling was over before I'd even finished my glass of Champagne." And even if the happiness we derive from any particular accomplishment lasts longer than that, our sense of well-being will inevitably fade as we come to take its benefits for granted. The hedonic treadmill never stops... I'm not suggesting that we should stop striving toward these goals. Winning beats losing, and there are many benefits to be derived from objective, external accomplishments. But we should not allow our happiness, our sense of well-being, our sense of self-worth, to hinge upon whether or not we attain these goals".
Suppose everything we knew about coach education was wrong - "The ongoing research into coach maturity (Rajasinghe, et al. 2022) indicates that to coach effectively, rather than go through the motions, we have to focus less on doing coaching and more on being a coach. It doesn’t matter how many tools and techniques you have, what counts is how you integrate them into the relationship with the client. It’s like the difference between someone reading from a joke book and a comedian who brings the narrative to life. Yet course content is almost entirely about concept and technique (see below in our section on accreditation of coach training schools). What’s missing is meaning - the integration of what we do with who we are".
Qualities of a great sports coach - "There is no single correct way to coach an athlete. You have your own unique coaching style that works and that no one else can replicate. Nevertheless, there are some traits that are common to all great coaches, no matter how they are applied". I am not a sports coach, but I'm here for the multi-disciplinary learning!
If you're a CEO or senior leader who would like to explore working together, then get in touch.
Until next month,
