Pragmatic Thinking Learning: A Journey From Novice To Expert — Dreyfus At Work: Herding Racehorses And Racing Sheep
Table of Contents
About Series
The Summary
— The Sad Fact of Skill Distribution
The Mind Map
Outro
About Series
This story is the third part of the series of Chapter 2: Journey From Novice To Expert.
The Summary
Experts aren’t perfect
They can make mistakes just like anyone else, they are subject to the same cognitive and other biases. They will also likely disagree with one another on topics within their field.
By misunderstanding the Dreyfus model, we can rob them of their expertise. It’s actually easy to derail an expert and ruin their performance. All you have to do is force them to follow the rules.
Rules ruin experts
This has ramifications for teamwork as well. Consider any development methodology or corporate culture that dictates iron-clad rules. What impact will that have on the experts in the team? It will drag their performance down to the level of the novice. You lose all competitive advantage of their expertise
Intuition is the tool of the expert in all fields, but organizations tend to discount it because they mistakenly feel that intuition “isn’t scientific” or “isn’t repeatable”. So, we tend to throw out the baby with the bathwater and don’t listen to the experts to whom we pay so much.
We also tend to take novices and throw them in the deep end of the development pool — far over their heads. They need to be “herded”, that is, given unambiguous direction, quick successes, and so on.
Use rules for novices, intuition for experts
The Sad Fact of Skill Distribution
Most people are advance beginners
Metacognitive abilities, or the ability of being self — aware, tends to be possible only at the higher levels.
- Unfortunately, this means practitioners at the lower skill levels have a marked tendency to overestimate their own abilities — by as much as 50 percent, as it turns out
- The only path to a more self — assessment is to improve the individual’s skill level, which in turn increases metacognitive ability
Second-order-incompetence, not knowing just how much it is that you don’t know. The beginner is confident despite the odds; the expert will be far more cautious when the going gets weird. Experts will show much more self-doubt.
Know what you don’t know
Expert != Teacher
Experts aren’t always the best teachers. Teaching is an expertise in its own right; just because you are expert in some subject is no guarantee that you can teach it to others.
You may find that someone at a competent level might be in better position to teach a novice than an expert would be
When pairing or mentoring within the team, you might try using mentors who are closer in skill level to the trainee
The hallmark of the expert is their use of intuition and the ability to recognize patterns in context.
Intuition and pattern matching replace explicit knowledge
Ten Years to Expertise?
So you want to be an expert? You need to budget about ten years of effort, regardless of the subject area. Researchers have studied, many professions. In virtually every case, from Mozart to Beatles, you find evidence of minimum of a decade of hard work before world-class expertise shows up
The Mind Map
Outro
For me, the interesting part of this chapter is:
Rules ruin experts
