The difference between being obsessive and excellent can be quite thin.

I’ve been spending time reading some of the research on expertise. Some things stood out. One can work in a field for 20 years and not be an expert. Experts are not backseat drivers or armchair critics. Experts make different and better decisions in complex settings. Experts can be overconfident. We also assume, wrongly, that experts became experts because they are smarter. And Lord knows, over the next few decades we’re going to need more of them.

According to the research, experts become experts because they are more persistent. They often take greater risks, practice longer and do so for extended periods of time, 10-20 years depending on the discipline. In fact, the one thing that experts seem to have in common is the motivation that enables them to persist in more difficult terrain than the non-experts do.

Becoming an expert involves turning information in the external world we sense into a form that we can keep in our brains, long-term, recall at will and combine with related information in new ways. All experts need to go through extended training periods, typically early in their lives (teens and twenties), which is when we are at our smartest in terms of processing novel information. As we age, we lose the edge on our working-memory capabilities which are crucial for converting information in the world to stored information in our brains.

But as we age, we have the advantage of using all that stuff we’ve stored in our brains. Provided, of course, we actually did try to store things in our brain. This is why youth doesn’t uniformly overcome the guile of experience.

I have a hypothesis. Some computer people, especially those who write software, tend to get a bit addicted to the work, doing it at night and weekends. For many, it’s downright fun, especially early in their career. This sounds like an expert in the making.

Now for the rub.

As managers, do we do things that inadvertently stunt expertise development? Like promote people to leadership too young? Like churn and burn them with repetitive work that no longer challenges them? Like give them so many interruptions and meetings to attend that they cannot devote the required “practice” time to become an expert?

Do the young people in the industry today do things to themselves that prevent them from being experts? Like waste time in meaningless media munching and game playing that takes away from systematically learning their field? Like not wanting to study on the weekends and weeknights? Like wanting to have a so-called normal, well balanced life? Like failing to be obsessive enough to be excellent?

You do not have flash or javascript support.

Average (6 votes)

Reply