(Deliberate) Practice Makes Perfect
Friday Learning Notes
Question: If you had the choice between a family doctor with 25 years of experience vs. a family doctor with 10 years of experience, which one would you choose?
Answer: If you chose the doctor with 25 years’ experience, you may have ended up with lower quality healthcare.
Writer Scott Young shares this seemingly paradoxical a fascinating tale of two doctors. In a 2005 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers discovered that:
“Physicians with more experience are generally believed to have accumulated knowledge and skills during years in practice and therefore to deliver high-quality care. However, evidence suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the number of years that a physician has been in practice and the quality of care that the physician provides.”
It was a surprising result, but general practitioners seemed to get worse the more experience they had.
Did this mean that all doctors got worse over time? In a different study, surgeons were proven to get better the more experience they had.
What is the distinction between these two types of practitioners that made one group improve and the other plateau over time?
One possible explanation is deliberate practice. Deliberate practice refers to practice that is purposeful and systematic. One element of this is rapid feedback, which helps advance learning. Surgeons receive this immediate feedback while operating, motivating them to continually better their skills. General practitioners will only find out if their prescribed treatment worked over long periods of time, or sometimes not at all.
Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule — that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert — has made it seem like we can learn anything if we just take the time. In reality, it’s not just time, but how we use it that makes us better.
This video by Annie Bosler and Don Greene explains that mastery is not simply the amount of hours you put in. It is also the quality and effectiveness of that practice. According to them, this practice should be consistent, intensely focused, and target weaknesses at the edge of your current abilities.
At Omidyar Network, deliberate practice comes in many forms, but perhaps the most important is the experience our investment management team gets when they engage in our investment committee decision making processes. As most venture capitalists will tell you, venture capital is an apprenticeship business. You learn it well by observing experts and developing your own pattern recognition. Out of observing thousands of companies, a good VC partnership will often distill knowledge into general rules and principles based on the continuous feedback from their decisions.
How can you incorporate elements of deliberate practice into your work?
#AlwaysLearning
Roy
Our Friday Learning Notes series is designed to share insights from Omidyar Network’s journey to become a best-in-class learning organization. Grab a cup of coffee and start your own Friday morning learning journey! *warning: side effects of regular reading may include improved mood, upswing in dinner party conversation, and/or increased desire to cultivate learning for social impact
