I”ve advocated, repeatedly, the importance of practice. Yet, too often, we still see an ‘event’-based model, where it’s one and done. Unfortunately, this doesn’t align with how our brains work! I was looking at one of Elevator 9‘s Liftology videos (caveat: I did the original scripting), where they mentioned ‘practice like we play’. I’d heard it before (in various incarnations), but this time it struck me that perhaps it’s the right vehicle to penetrate complacency about learning design. Should we emphasize “we play as we practice”?
The underlying phenomena is that we need lots of practice, for two reasons. For one, the ‘learning’ mechanism that strengthens our learning can only do so much before it needs sleep. If you want to truly develop a skill, sufficient practice, over time, is required. It’s like building muscle, or training for a sport; occasional practice isn’t sufficient. The right practice, repeated and improved over time, is necessary.
The other is that we are very context sensitive. That is, our consciousness is very much influenced by where and how things are happening. If you want to successfully generate transfer to many different situations (such as sales, or negotiation, or…things that happen in many different contexts with different people and different goals and…), you need sufficient practice across contexts. Our brain abstracts across the contexts seen to determine the space of transfer. Thus, we need widely varied practice to generate a generalized ability to do.
Yet, too often, we see people getting it right ‘once’, and thinking that’s enough. It might be sufficient to tick a box, but it’s not sufficient to generate a new ability. The problem is, there’s a lot of pressure against this. Folks don’t want to take the time and money, they want to believe that new information will yield a behavior change, it’s just too hard!
So, I’m wondering if rethinking the messaging will help. If we emphasize that what we do is dependent on what we practice, maybe we can get away from the school mentality of ‘study, pass test, forget’. We want to get to the ‘practice practice practice to be good enough to play’ mentality.
I don’t know if “we play as we practice” is the best vehicle, or even one, but I’m kinda desperate, I guess. I’m very very tired of folks not getting that meaningful change requires sustained effort. And I’m really looking for a solution. It seems like this might tap into some useful mental frameworks. Can this help? If not, do you have a better solution? Please?
It’s interesting how in some venues this idea seems to come naturally – sports and music leap to mind, where we take it for granted that repeated practice will be necessary, and that performing well once does not constitute the end of the process. I wonder if it has something to do with the performance aspect of both of those activities; you’re generally (often? Now I’m thinking of lots of counter-examples, like non-competetive weight-lifting, or playing music to yourself for the joy of it) going to be doing both before an audience, repeatedly, with the pressure of wanting to perform well each time – or even better every time. I don’t know that that helps any when it comes to teaching skills that there is no obvious way to “perform”, though.
When it comes to applying core skills in a number of contexts, I can think of few better examples than boardgames. I play a lot of modern boardgames, which often involve fairly complex systems of rules interactions. But there are some core mechanics that are fairly universally recognised amongst the community, and that are often pieced together in more or less novel ways and attached to a setting to form a new game. Things like “push-your-luck” – judging the odds and gambling your previous wins against the chance for more. Or “card drafting”, where you are dealt a hand of cards, must keep one or more of them and pass the rest to your opponent(s), so you need to judge not just how useful a card is to you, but how useful it might be to them. I can teach most of a fairly complex new game to experienced players by just telling them its an engine-building set-collection game set in a zoo where the cards are drafted and your actions are chosen in a Concordia-style rota. What any of that means is irrelevant; the point is that these same core skills run through lots of different games/contexts, where it’s easy to repeatedly measure your progress (the score at the end of the game.) And of course engagement is built-in and catered to in the usual Darwinian fashion of games; if it wasn’t engaging, no one would play.
I couldn’t agree more, Clark. That’s why as a learning & development professional who coaches individuals, designs and delivers trainings, I co-founded Elevator9 (and why I’m so grateful for your advising). I recognized there is so much more we can be doing for the companies and the program participants they enroll in my trainings. While a one-off event brings in revenue for me, it’s unlikely that it can facilitate the intended learning outcomes without further interventions afterwards. The learning event should be viewed as just one potential step along the learning journey. Providing opportunities for participants to practice what they have begun to learn when they go back to the context of their role is necessary for the learning to stick and performance to change over time.
Athletes, musicians, actors – even chess players need to put in the practice over time so they can perform better when they’re on the “stage.” It’s time organizations recognize that investing time and money in learning takes more than one-off events to drive successful outcomes. It takes opportunities for continued practice!
But how do we persuade others in L&D that this can and should be done? We can start by showing them what we can do for them
Rob, good point. However, I suspect that there’s a lot of practice with those experienced players to know what all those terms mean. It does help, many times, to tap into the familiar (c.f. metaphors) to assist learning. Still, to even build those foundations also takes time.
Completely agree Clark and I will be sharing this post. However, there is a nuance about practice in those sporting and music environments that I think you have missed when transferring to the workplace. There is a training ground/court, a driving range, a rehearsal studio. In the workplace we exhort people to “Now go and practice with your team!”, when what we are really saying is “Now go and fail live!”.
If we are really going to practice like we play, then we need a practice court for business skills. One where the only consequence is learning and improvement, where we get feedback and can try again – ie Ericsson’s “Deliberate Practice”
You’re right that these motor-skill performances have practice environments, but we can build mini- and branching scenarios, or full game sims for practice. We can also mentor live practice, and make failure ok. Yes, I’m definitely arguing for providing safe, repeated, varied, appopriate practice before it matters.