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Most people believe experience improves ability. As we accumulate experience, our skills grow.

At least that’s the theory. And the hope. But it’s not what really happens. In reality, we stagnate. We think we’re getting better but produce little tangible proof. As the saying goes, 30 years of experience is often 1 year of experience repeated 30 times.

Think this doesn’t apply to you? Can you honestly describe the skills you have recently learned? What can you do better today than you did one year ago? Or 5 years ago? Could your peers tell you what you’re doing better? Or would they shrug their shoulders?

Do you have evidence of improvement or just a feeling?

As we’ll discover, we gravitate towards comfortability over growth. Improvement happens when we reach beyond our current ability, not repeat our strengths. That doesn’t happen automatically. It’s easier to get through our days than it is to get something out of them.

This isn’t an isolated occurrence. It’s prevalent across all fields. Let’s learn from the mistakes and wisdom of others. We start with a profession where improving ability separates life and death: firefighting.

Karl Weick has spent much of his career studying how organizations respond to a crisis. Karl emphasizes a surprising lesson from wildland firefighting:

I've always been struck by evidence suggesting that there are certain periods during a person's career, when they are most in danger of getting injured or killed. Police, for example, are in most danger of being shot during their 5th year on the force.

Firefighters are in most danger of fireline accidents either in their first 2 years or after 10-15 years of experience.

Young firefighters are vulnerable because of their inability to recognize hazardous situations.

The more experienced firefighters are vulnerable because they presume they've seen it all, they have less openness to new data, thus the validity of their models decreases. The unexpected gets them.1

It makes intuitive sense that inexperienced firefighters have more accidents. They don’t have the skills to navigate volatile environments. Their training hasn’t caught up with real-world demands.

But experienced firefighters? How can they be more vulnerable after 10-15 years of experience?

It contradicts what we all believe: the more experience, the better we get. But it doesn’t work that way. As we’ll discover, doctors, business professionals, pilots, auditors, psychologists, etc, all see stagnation or degradation with more experience. It’s pervasive across industries.

How does this happen? And how do we avoid it?   

It’s a danger of perceived expertise. It’s the risk of relying on years of experience rather than objective measures of ability. We know we should be better, but we’re not. Our abilities lag changing demands, even though our confidence grows.

Here’s the problem. Our behavior devolves over time.

Once we get to be “good enough”, we stop learning. We stop accepting feedback. We replace deep learning with busyness. We deflect coaching and criticism. We become complacent with our abilities. We stop doing the things that initially made us successful.

Geoff Colvin, author of Talent is Overrated, explains why we fail to get better with more experience.

Look around you. Look at your friends, your relatives, your coworkers, the people you meet when you shop or go to a party. How do they spend their days? Most of them work. They all do many other things as well, playing sports, performing music, pursuing hobbies, doing public service.

Now ask yourself honestly: How well do they do what they do? The most likely answer is that they do it fine. They do it well enough to keep doing it. At work they don’t get fired and probably get promoted a number of times...

But the odds are that few if any of the people around you are truly great at what they do—awesomely, amazingly, world-class excellent. Why—exactly why—aren’t they? Why don’t they manage businesses like Jack Welch or Andy Grove, or play golf like Tiger Woods, or play the violin like Itzhak Perlman? After all, most of them are good, conscientious people, and they probably work diligently.

Some of them have been at it for a very long time—twenty, thirty, forty years. Why isn’t that enough to make them great performers? It clearly isn’t. The hard truth is that virtually none of them has achieved greatness or come even close, and only a tiny few ever will.2

We gradually acclimate to mediocrity without knowing it. It’s rarely obvious. If we’re not aware of learning opportunities, there’s no chance of improvement.

Laurence Enderson, author of Pebbles of Perception, explains:

To this we add work experience, reach a level of competence, and sort of coast our way through life from there. In short, we settle. At a certain level of competence we can navigate life pretty well, so the incentive to keep learning is not always obvious to us. Excessive ego is also a discovery dampener.3

Geoff Colvin reiterates:

In fact the reality is more puzzling than that. Extensive research in a wide range of fields shows that many people not only fail to become outstandingly good at what they do, no matter how many years they spend doing it, they frequently don’t even get any better than they were when they started. Auditors with years of experience were no better at detecting corporate fraud—a fairly important skill for an auditor—than were freshly trained rookies. When it comes to judging personality disorders, which is one of the things we count on clinical psychologists to do, length of clinical experience told nothing about skill—“the correlations,” concluded some of the leading researchers, “are roughly zero.”4

Why is it so hard to get better?

Years of experience and hours worked are easy but misleading guides to expertise. Quantity is effective when quality is present. Quality over quantity.

Most action is busyness, not deliberate training. Showing up looks good on paper but doesn’t improve ability.

K. Anders Ericsson, author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, elaborates:

People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie baking is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless. They assume that someone who has been driving for twenty years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five, that a doctor who has been practicing medicine for twenty years must be a better doctor than one who has been practicing for five, that a teacher who has been teaching for twenty years must be better than one who has been teaching for five.5

Think about driving a car. Even after decades of driving experience, have any of us actually improved our driving ability? How many of us could drive professionally in NASCAR or Formula One?

We’re not even close. Yet, we’ve put in thousands of hours of “practice”. Where’s the skill after all those years?

It’s simple – our driving hasn’t been practice. It’s been showing up and going through the motions. And it’s no different with your career or any other skill. Showing up doesn’t work.

Activity isn’t equal. It’s not the hours that matter. It’s what you do with them.

Ericsson continues:

Expertise is not about a certain number of hours practiced. Rather, it’s about the type of work that fills those hours. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.6

It’s the “perfect” part of perfect practice that trips people up. Perfect practice uses well-defined, specific goals to improve skills outside our competence.

But what if you think you don’t need to do this? Maybe this doesn’t apply to you?

Meet Atul Gawande. Gawande is a world-class surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He’s a professor at Harvard Medical School. He’s been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. He’s a 4x New York Times best-selling author.

It’s an understatement to say he’s successful.

But even Gawande realized he wasn’t getting better:

I’ve been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better.

As I went along, I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages. My rates of complications moved steadily lower and lower. And then, a couple of years ago, they didn’t. It started to seem that the only direction things could go from here was the wrong one.7

Gawande was fortunate to have the insight and self-reflection to recognize his plateau. He could have explained away his rising complication rates by blaming external factors. But a chance encounter on the tennis court reinforced his hunch:

Gawande explains:

Not long afterward, I watched Rafael Nadal play a tournament match on the Tennis Channel. The camera flashed to his coach, and the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.

But doctors don’t. I’d paid to have a kid just out of college look at my serve. So why did I find it inconceivable to pay someone to come into my operating room and coach me on my surgical technique?8

Coaching works because it replaces mindless activity with directed purpose. We need to create a coaching environment, either with a real coach or by simulating the coaching experience.

What doesn’t work is showing up and hoping for improvement. Professional athletes and musicians don’t hope for learning. They make a concentrated, planned, and deliberate effort to ensure improvement happens. It’s rare to see this practiced in the corporate world.

Fight the “good enough” mindset.

K. Anders Ericsson explains:

Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement.…the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve.9

We need to shift our approach if we want improvement.

The first is our mindset. We need to accept that we don’t know everything. After 20 or 30 years of experience, chances are the world has changed and left us behind. 

When we believe we know everything, improvement stops. We don’t want to appear ignorant, so we fake our ability.

Fearing ignorance contributed to the deaths of 13 firefighters during the Mann Gulch fire. Weick explains:

Crews and commanders need to keep learning and updating their models. This won't happen if they presume that nothing about fires can surprise them, if near misses are treated as testimonials to safe practices, and if they are certain that they've experienced all possible ways in which a system can fail. These attitudes won't change if they reflect similar attitudes in top management. You may recall that Maclean felt "the Forest Service wanted to downplay the explosive nature of the Mann Gulch fire to protect itself against public charges that its ignorance of fire behavior was responsible for the tragedy" (Maclean, 1992, p. 125). The key word there is " ignorance." The service doesn't want to appear ignorant. Nor do it's crews. The price of creating this impression may be a loss in vigilance, learning, and wisdom.10

Improvement doesn’t happen overnight. Instead of trying to do everything at once, focus on getting 1% better.

David Brailsford emphasizes the power of 1%:

David Brailsford, performance director of British cycling, boiled down his philosophy behind all their success. Performance by the aggregation of marginal gains…Instead of looking for one earth shattering change, it looks at every aspect of performance and tries to improve each a little bit, even just a 10th of a percent. Soon those marginal gains began to add up to big gaps between you and your competition.11

Annie Duke, author of Thinking in Bets and a world-renowned poker player, reinforces the point:

The benefits of recognizing just a few extra learning opportunities compound over time. The cumulative effect of being a little better at decision-making, like compounding interest, can have huge effects in the long run on everything that we do.12

A 1% improvement may not be visible on a daily basis but gradually builds a commanding advantage.

Don’t Practice Failure

We also need to recognize our errors and immediately correct. Deliberate practice can work in reverse – the more we practice incorrectly, the more effective we’ll be at screwing up. The harder it will be to unlearn.

That’s why feedback is important. Once we recognize mistakes, we can correct them and start to learn.  

Encode Success. Practice makes permanent. Practice that encodes failure is common. We don’t observe carefully to see if things are done right.13

Here’s how Bill Walsh, former coach of the San Francisco 49ers, implemented this idea:Top of Form

You might think that trying to meet his extremely high expectations would tighten you up, but Bill didn’t jump on you for a mistake; he came right in with the correction: “Here’s what was wrong; this is how to do it right.” Over and over, without getting all upset, he taught the smallest details of perfecting performance.14

The idea is to correct, not critique. Doug Lemov, author of Practice Perfect, describes the difference:

·         Critique: telling someone how to do it better

·         Correction: going back and doing it again and better - ASAP

·         Critiquing doesn’t help; correction helps. Focus on the solution rather than the problem15

Life is more enjoyable when we control our attention and effort. Control gives us meaning and agency over our lives. Powerful factors for living a fulfilling life.

Laurence Enderson explains:

Why not make a conscious decision to learn something new every day? No matter how small the daily learning, it is significant when aggregated over a lifetime. Resolving early in life to have a continuous learning mindset is not only more interesting than the passive alternative, it is also remarkably powerful. Choosing lifelong learning is one of the few good choices that can make a big difference in our lives, giving us an enormous advantage when practiced over a long period of time.16

Remember, there is no end to this process. It’s the process that should be rewarding, not reaching the finish line.

Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They are masters because they realize that there isn’t one.17

 

 

Sources:

1.       Karl Weick, Findings From the Wildland Firefighters Human Factors Workshop. https://www.fs.fed.us/t-d/pubs/htmlpubs/htm95512855/page15.htm

2.       Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else

3.       Laurence Enderson, Pebbles of Perception: How a Few Good Choices Make All the Difference

4.       Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else

5.       Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

6.       Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

7.       Atul Gawande, Personal Best. Top Athletes and Singers Have Coaches. Should You? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/personal-best

8.       Atul Gawande. Personal Best. Top Athletes and Singers Have Coaches. Should You? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/personal-best

9.       Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

10.   Karl Weick, Findings From the Wildland Firefighters Human Factors Workshop. https://www.fs.fed.us/t-d/pubs/htmlpubs/htm95512855/page15.htm

11.   Mark McClusky, Faster, Higher, Stronger: The New Science of Creating Superathletes, and How You Can Train Like Them

12.   Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

13.   Doug Lemov, Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better

14.   Bill Walsh, The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership

15.   Doug Lemov, Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better

16.   Laurence Enderson, Pebbles of Perception: How a Few Good Choices Make All the Difference

17.   Sarah Lewis, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery