Skill Acquisition
One Size Does Not Fit Anyone
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Successful software developers know that continuous learning is critical. Not just the latest technology — that’s hard enough — but also learning how the team works together, how the evolving product responds to change and stresses, how the customer or market is growing and changing, and more.
But not all learning is equal. How you learn, what problem-solving techniques you use, what mental models you create; all of these things change as you develop skills in a specific area.
Two researchers — brothers, by the name of Dreyfus — developed a skills model that illustrates these changes. Their research looked at highly skilled practitioners, including commercial airline pilots and world-renowned chess masters. They discovered that quite a bit changes as you move from novice to expert. You don’t just “know more” as you gain skill. Instead, you experience fundamental differences in how you perceive the world, how you approach problem solving, and the mental models you form and use. How you go about acquiring new skills changes. External factors that help your performance — or hinder it — change as well.
The Dreyfus Model defines five stages, ranging from novice to expert:
The model applies per skill, not per person, so you may be an expert at Scrabble but a novice at scuba diving, or vice-versa. Also, you don’t just suddenly graduate from one stage to the next, the boundaries are a little fuzzy.
As you grow from novice toward expert, you move:
- From reliance on abstract principles To relying on past experience
- From a problem as a collection of equal bits To a unique whole; only certain bits count
- From detached observer of the problem To an involved part of the system itself
Also notice that skill stages are not evenly distributed: most people, at most skills, quickly move from novice to advanced beginner. But then they stay there — advanced beginner is “good enough” to get work done. Conversely, there are very few experts in any field — something like one to five percent or so.
Let’s take a closer look at each stage.
Stage 1: Novice
Everyone is a novice at some skill when they start, as they have no experience yet. Novices can perform this skill but need easy, context-free rules to follow, like this:
When this happens, do that
Novices are characterized as follows:
- Have little or no previous experience
- Don’t want to learn: just want to accomplish a goal (that’s me doing my taxes)
- Don’t know how to respond to mistakes (again, taxes)
- Are vulnerable to confusion (still taxes)
- Must be rules-based, context free (oh, just send it all in)
Remember when you were a novice at something? Think about learning a new programming language. It’s frustrating! You mistype an example from a book, and then have no idea what the compiler error message means. You randomly poke at it and try stuff to make the error go away.
Checklists, rules, and easy-to-follow steps make a novice functional.
Stage 2: Advanced Beginner
Most people don’t stay novices for long. As you gain experience — even just a little experience — you begin to move toward an advanced beginner, with these characteristics:
- Start trying tasks on your own
- Have difficulty troubleshooting
- Impatience — you want information fast
- Can place some advice in required context
- Have no overall, holistic understanding
Advanced beginners are gaining some capability, but are still hampered by lack of troubleshooting skills and the context of the larger, overall picture. But there’s a catch here:
Advanced beginners don’t want the big picture
The big picture is confusing at this stage, and even annoying. Think about the all-hands meeting where the CFO or a VP went over fiscal projections. Odds are, unless you have skill in that area, it’s so far afield as to be annoying.
Advanced beginners need small, frequent rewards to maintain motivation, and still rely on context-free rules to function.
Stage 3: Competent
While most people easily slide from novice to advanced beginner, there’s a greater hurdle in moving from advanced beginner to the competent stage. Here you have enough experience that you can begin to develop and use mental models related to the skill. You can:
- Develop your own conceptual models
- Troubleshoot problems on your own
- Seek out expert user advice and apply it effectively
- Create conscious, long-term plans and goals — not just stimulus-response reactions
Competent practitioners can troubleshoot
Stage 4: Proficient
Now the thirst for learning really kicks in. At the proficient stage, you:
- Want to understand the larger conceptual framework
- Are frustrated by oversimplified information
- Will self-correct previous poor task performance
- Can learn from the experience of others
- Can understand and apply maxims: proverbial, fundamental advice for that context*
*For example, “test everything that could possibly break.”
Proficient practitioners can self-correct
This is very important: self-correction can happen effectively only at the proficient stage. So any agile approach that advises you to “reflect and adapt” is not going to be effective with novices, advanced beginners, and competent practitioners.
Where advanced beginners do not want the big picture, proficient practitioners have to have the big picture in order to function. At this stage, you need the contextual clues that only a holistic, systems-wide, big picture can give you.
Stage 5: Expert
Few people actually become expert at any given skill, which means they:
- Are primary sources of knowledge and information
- Continually look for better methods
- Know the difference between relevant and irrelevant details
- Work from intuition, not reason or rules
- Don’t need fixed rules — fixed rules degrade performance
The Dreyfus research showed that forcing higher-skilled practitioners to follow the rules degrades their performance to that of a beginner.
Rules ruin experts
While there are several significant differences between an expert and the lower skill stages, perhaps the most significant is the idea that experts tend to work from intuition. Now “intuition” is a bit of a slippery word — some people equate it to magic or gut feeling. But real intuition is more like an emergent property that arises from deep, meaningful experience.
But intuition is not generally repeatable, and just like a black-box AI engine, experts can be inarticulate as to how they arrived at a decision. They don’t really know. But that’s okay. That’s how intuition works. Many dysfunctional companies might not understand or respect that and will try and enforce low-level, beginner-style rules on their experts. As the Dreyfus research showed, that approach limits the expert’s effectiveness to that of a novice.
Experts use intuition
Working Together
The challenge, of course, is that across an organization, or even on just a single team, you’ll have people who are at all different skill stages. A manager is likely a novice at software development. A developer is likely a novice at the domain or accounting. Everyone is likely a novice at a new process or practice.
When communicating with other people, stop and consider just how they might want the information: do they need beginner-level, step-by-step instructions? Do they need the big picture? Or not? When in doubt, just ask. And consider your own skill stage so that you can help others meet your needs.
Finally, even though experts create and use mental models and approach problem solving very differently from a novice, there is one very important feature of a novice that the expert has to retain:
Keep the beginner’s mind
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Master (1905–1971)
In other words, even as an expert, stay open to possibilities. This situation might look just like every situation before it. Maybe it is, but maybe it is not. Don’t assume it’s business as usual every time.
Because it likely isn’t.
/\ndy
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