So, what differentiates the person who learns from experience from one who doesn't? If 20 years' experience is, too often, just one year repeated 20 times, what might help to avoid the latter?
One answer might be that the person who is successful at learning from experience is
one who cultivates expertise with the right kind of practice.
Research on expertise points to the importance of repeated practice that is just challenging enough to increase skills: difficult enough to require some work, but not so difficult as to undermine motivation (see, for instance the
Scientific American article on experise I mentioned before; along similiar lines is a piece in
SEED with a
short accompaniment on how to be Tiger Woods or Mozart). Practice and experience can build the expert's (unconscious) repertoire of patterns to recognize and match, and a corresponding set of responses. The expertise--which is often labeled "instinct"--is manifested in a kind of automatic decision-making and action. The stories told by Malcom Gladwell in
Blink illustrate this.
As situations get more complex, expertise can be a double-edged sword. This is the pitfall that gives rise to Karl Weick's exhortation to engage in
sensemaking. Gladwell and Atul Gawande, a thoughtful doctor, reflected on the
limits of expertise in a recent presentation;
listen here. The ideas at play here: encourage experts to interact with others and to interrupt the automatic flow of judgment and response in favor or more conscious action. Crisis and complacency are two triggers for inappropriately automatic action by experts. For instance, the threat-rigidity response documented by psychologists is argued to play out in organizations when managers and others confront apparent threats and rely on overlearned responses.
But if we return to the question of how people get better at what they do, other streams of research on learning also point to something different, which contrasts with the practice-makes-perfect idea behind the study of expertise and connects to the ideas raised by those who point to the limits of expertise.
Proponents of this line of work argue that
reflection is essential for learning, in particular for professionals who must operate in a complex world. The advice here is for the learner to engage in a practice of stepping back, making sense of, and reflecting on experience. This was the key argument made by Donald Schon in
The Reflective Practitioner. He differentiated the kind of automatic action that one undertakes in the moment, in which improvisation, sensemaking, and problem-solving happen on the fly with its complement: a post-hoc, explicitly intellectual reflection in which the learner grapples more consciously with what happened. Calling the former reflection-in-action and the latter reflection-on-action, Schon and his colleague Chris Argyris argued that professionals benefit from taking both practices seriously, that the latter is often under-emphasized, and that coaching can help.
In the study of education, Jennifer Moon explores the role of reflection, which recent years has seen gain emphasis in the study of adult education (or androgagy). See
Moon's latest book. Plenty of ideas from education, as well as other streams of social science (such as Action Science), provide great starting points for an understanding of how reflection as a lifelong practice enables learning and development over the course of a career. But I haven't found much empirical research to show how such practices might play out. For instance, apart from the anecdotal, we know little about how effective practitioners actually embed reflection into their lives; nor could I find studies that document the career or job performance effects of teaching such practices to students in professional education programs.
In the vein of Argryis and Schon, other work on learning emphasizes the need for collaboration in reflection, as the work of
David Boud and colleagues shows (see
Productive Reflection at Work: Learning for Changing Organizations, edited by Boud & others). A book-chapter overview of experience-based learning appears
here, and
infed offers a trove of writings on reflection and rated topics. The notion of communities of practice and situated learning are also related, and an intriguing stream of management research connects change and learning in organizations to these ideas--more on this in a future post!
And to return to the question about learning from experience that I set out to explore today: Is it practice or reflection that makes perfect? The answer has to be, of course, both.