Just Practice
I have a daughter — she’s just15 months old — and I love watching her interact with the world, exploring, noticing, falling down and getting back up. Mostly I love seeing how a little human learns new things. There’s no emotional struggle, no desire for perfection or rushing the process, just constant effort of trying something over and over again, making small, incremental improvements until finally one day it just clicks. This is how she learned to crawl, this is how she learned to walk, this is how she’s learning to “run” (it’s actually like a funny jumble of arms going in wildly different directions, feet moving at just a slightly faster, more erratic pace). For the most part, her days are filled with joyful practice. She’s constantly being rewarded for that practice with new skills, new understandings, and new ways of being in the world.
I’ve thought about this often over the last 15 months — the idea that as babies and children we learn through tireless repetition until we finally posses a new skill — usually a new skill that completely revolutionizes our little world (crawling, walking, talking!). But as we grow older, we forget that this is how we learned everything we know. We stop enjoying the tireless trying, the pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone, the risk of failure. We instead just want to be great at everything we try, attempting to bypass the countless hours required to acquire a new skill.
This week I started reading Samantha Slade’s book Going Horizontal. I was reminded as I read chapter 2 — Practicing is the Path to Mastery — by the truth that if we truly want to learn a new skill or behavior, we must practice. I really appreciate the idea that while it’s important to act, it’s not just in the doing, it’s also a structured environment in which we do our practice that gives our practice form, and that we also require self-reflection to develop a new skill. The Do-Observe-Reflect loop.
“Practices don’t happen by osmosis. We need to intentionally and actively initiate new behaviors”.
But “practice” can be a dirty word, or a disempowering word at times, at least in the business world. If you’re practicing, it means you’re not yet an expert. If you’re practicing, it means you don’t have the one right way of getting to the solution. But why have we shunned the idea of practice in our businesses? We’ve shunned practice because we’ve been told over and over again that there’s no room for error, that if we want to impress our clients, or our bosses, that we have to act like we know the solution, as though there is a solution.
This is one area that I’ve struggled with as I’ve gone out as a consultant to talk with leaders and executives about their company culture, organizational design, and Ways of Working. They ask what I would do, how I would alleviate their pain points. I’ve found that I usually say something to the effect of — “I’m not sure, I don’t know your organization well enough yet… but let’s try some experiments, let’s develop some new practices, and see where they lead us.” This is not a very compelling argument, at least not the way I’ve been able to tell it. Leaders want solutions, not experiments & practice, but I believe that anyone who’s selling solutions is likely selling false hope. So where does that leave me? It leaves me searching for better practices, more experience with these practices, and new stories to tell that help others see that learning and change is at least partially in the practice itself, not just the final solution.
So, I guess this is all to say that I like Samantha Slade’s push to just start practicing. I don’t have to be perfect, and I won’t be an expert right away (or any time soon), but that shouldn’t stop me from taking the first baby steps, falling down, and picking myself up to try again. I’m feeling excited and empowered to develop new practices, both for myself and also my team, that we can dive into without anyone’s permission.
