Here’s a story ..it happened to me…

Several years ago I was traveling to an client event in another country. I had been in my new position a couple of months at most. My boss was meeting me there, and  was to brief me on the details. I arrived a couple days early to visit with family — a good thing because on Day 1, the client called asking me to come. Boss was still in New York. So in I went.

Upon arrival I was told that a critical video that we created was stuck at the border.  I was to get it released ASAP. I smiled and said “yes, I’ll take care of it.” I had no idea what they were talking about. Couldn’t find my boss. Panic began to eat at the edges of my brain. I called everyone I knew to get the cell number of the one guy who could release the tape. He was eating dinner.  He apologized, and said he would take care of it as soon as the border customs office opened. Whew!

And then the real whammy happened on Day 1 @ 2 am (ok, technically Day 2). My boss called. She missed her connecting flight. She managed to get a flight to a city that was actually further away. Clearly geography was not her strong suite. But crazier still, they threatened to deport her because of something she said when she crossed the border: “work”. Never, ever, say you’re coming in to work in another country unless you have a work visa. I gave her this advice. Repeated it. To sum up, she would not arrive until much later on Day 2 — if she arrived at all. Me alone with the client (that’s plural client not singular) for another day. Didn’t really sleep.

Got up, put a smile on my face, and explained the crazy situation. Then volunteered to do whatever work they needed — and sure enough, they put to work. The tape arrived. Boss arrived. The rest of the event went swimmingly. We all survived.

When I got back, I was treated as a hero — if they could have given me the consultant equivalent of the purple heart they would have.

END OF STORY.

I can’t help think I could have been better prepared.

Is it possible to train for the unexpected?

YES, YES, YES!!!! Except I wouldn’t call it training…

• Step 1: Tell people the unexpected will happen.
• Teach them the power of negative thinking (book I read once). Have a team brainstorm about all the things that could go wrong and how you could prepare for them. What are the backup plans? This lesson I learned in radio — some technology will fail, some tape will break (yup, good ol’ analog days), some interviewee will *not* show up. Be prepared. Have a plan. Rehearse your plan.
• Who will answer the “red” phone at 3 am? The hardest thing is feeling that you are alone in a situation. The one thing that made a difference to me was connecting with one person who was still at the office at 7pm. Hearing a friendly voice tell me that she would do “everything she could to help me” made all the difference. Thank you team mate!
• Focus on the work that needs doing. I did my best to stay focused on the work that needed doing (get video, get boss, help client) It helped keep most of the anxiety at bay.
• Stay positive & stay focused on the needs of your client. It would have been very easy to fall into victim mode (“I’m not good enough”, “I can’t deal with this”, “I’m an impostor”, “it’s his/her/their fault”, “it’s not my job!”). Look it’s not about you, it’s about the client. So get over it. Put your “game-face” on, and as trite as it sounds, go out there with a positive attitude. What can you do to help?

Ambiguity, complexity, and the distributed expertise of teams creates “black swan” events. How can we deal with the unexpected, emergent behavior of systems? I think there’s a  game to be created here (or maybe several already exist?)

This isn’t training — it’s strategy.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Learning a complex new subject matter often takes extensive practice. Development of expertise requires many hours of practice. Malcolm Gladwell in his recent book Outliers emphasizes how it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. The research behind this claim comes  from studies done by John Hayes who found that geniuses in various fields produce their best work after 10 years of apprenticeship (which works out to about 10,000 hours); and by Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer (1993) which found that the best violinists practiced 7,000 hours before coming to a Berlin music academy, whereas the good violinists practiced only 5,000 hours. It takes about 3 years for London taxi drivers to acquire the “knowledge” of London in order to expertly navigate through the streets. It takes time to learn to learn the patterns, rules and problem-solving strategies for a domain of knowledge.

Deliberate practice – feedback

It is not any kind of practice that will help you become an expert – but deliberate practice. In this type of practice you are not just performing, but trying to learn how to do it better. Learners are usually highly motivated so when given feedback on their performance, and they carefully monitor their work to reduce differences and master the performance.

Julia with mallet - beware!

Part of deliberate practice is making mistakes and adjusting. I put this picture of Julia Child here as an inspiration. She is someone who learned to cook and become and expert in her field, through trial and error — doing it over and over again. And every meal was a test, and her diners without doubt gave her feedback. We should all be so fearless.

Test at regular intervals with feedback

Learners forget new information with time, very rapidly within the first day, and then less so over time. Testing learners has shown to help improve retention and recall. Therefore tests can be used not just for assessment, but as a study mechanism.

In studies by Landauer and Bjork (1978) they found that testing individuals  after a delay creates a sufficient level of difficulty that requires learners to work harder, thus improving their recall of an series of items. However, this was followed up Karpicke and Roediger (1979), who found that yes, creating a delay helped, but what helped more was giving people feedback after testing, therefore one could test at regular intervals, and provide feedback, and it would have the same effects.

It should be remembered that many of these experiments were done in the laboratory, on recall and retention of word pairs, so although likely useful in the “real world”, I have not seen field research verifying these experiments.

Practice, give feedback, test, give feedback and practice again. This guideline, like many of the others I have written about, should intuitively make sense. Perhaps in a context where compliance is an issue, the testing, practice, feedback cycle will be helpful (hopefully one can make it fun and not too onerous!) But being motivated, deliberate practice is the key to deep learning and expertise.