Wynton Marsalis’s talent isn’t an accident.
Marsalis, a virtuoso trumpeter with nine Grammy Awards and a Pulitzer, had a philosophy about practice, a set of rules he enacted that took him from someone who barely made his high school band to one of the greatest musicians of all time.
Marsalis knew that excellence happens intentionally. So much so that he wrote his own practice manifesto. Two of the most important takeaways in it?
1) Practice hard things longer.
2) Think for yourself. Or, in other words, build the capacity to reflect on your progress and judge it accurately.
Marsalis's commitment to practice after high school turned him into the musician he is today. But it wasn't just that he practiced; every musician practices. It was how he practiced. And that practice offers us lessons about how we can design learning for the people we lead.
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Lucky for us, a growing body of research gives us confirmation Marsalis was on to something.
Imagine you're in a bean-bag throwing contest for $5,000. The rules? Throw as many bean bags as you can into a target close to the ground from four feet away.
Before the competition, you get 24 hours to practice as much as you'd like.
How would you design your practice to set yourself up to win that $5,000?
I, like I imagine many of you, would practice a lot of four-foot shots into that target. I'd be a master at four feet with my eyes closed.
Well, apparently I'd also lose.
Professors Robert Kerr and Bernard Booth found that varying the distance you throw those bean bags from in practice -- some from five feet and some from three feet -- actually makes you better at throwing bean bags from four feet.
The takeaway? Variability in the practice you, or the people you manage, do before the main event is more likely to lead toward a successful outcome than practicing the exact scenario you're likely to find yourself in.
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The most effective practice has other criteria we overlook, too, much to the detriment of how we help others learn and develop, in both 1-on-1s and groups.
Desirable difficulties: Effective practice also needs to include desirable difficulties. These are challenges that are, yes, unpredictable, but more importantly, create opportunities for learners to become meta-cognitive about how they process encountering those challenges. What's more, those difficulties don't, according to the research, have to exactly mimic what learners are likely to experience when they need to perform at their best. So long as they’re close approximations of the real world, the benefit of the practice pays off.
Frequency of feedback: We've also gotten feedback all wrong. If you asked me what the frequency of feedback should be for learners, I'd say, "Often. Or whatever more than that is." Research shows that frequent feedback, while it might make learners perform better in the practice experience itself, doesn't actually make people better outside that experience. Feedback that comes too often, and too interruptive, it seems, doesn't allow learners to grapple enough on their own, forming the lasting neural connections that lock in what they need to walk out of the practice experience and into real life ready to implement.
Testing as a means for learning: There are few more powerful impacts on learning and retention than the effects of testing. Tests, it seems, function as learning events themselves, helping the learner recall and retrieve the skills and information necessary not only during the assessment, but long after it, as well. Sadly, we underappreciate testing, in large part because with adults, just like with kids, we use it as a means for evaluation rather than a means for learning.
Accurate self-assessment: One of Marsalis's principles of effective practice was that the learner needed to think for themselves. As a jazz musician practicing by himself the majority of the time, he needed to be able to accurately determine what he knew, and maybe more importantly, what he didn’t. Similarly, professor Robert Bjork has found that "individuals who have illusions of comprehension or competence pose a greater hazard to themselves and others than do individuals who correctly assess that they lack some requisite information or skill." Indeed, effective training helps learners realize the gaps in their own skill and knowledge acquisition, as well as potential biases that might be standing in the way of their success.
So what does this mean for how we can effectively design learning experiences for the people and teams we coach?
1) Introduce variability through desirable difficulties -- ask the learner before you start your next coaching session: What do you think the 2-3 biggest challenges you'll experience will be? Why will those be challenges for you? Then, incorporate those challenges into your next coaching session.
2) Be intentional about your feedback -- learning organizations prize real-time feedback sometimes at the learner's expense. Don't shortchange the metacognition that your people need to do by intentionally building in pause points for reflection and feedback at the middle and end of a learning event. Let your folks grapple a little more before jumping in with feedback and see what impact that has on their skill acquisition.
3) Use performance assessments for learning -- After each phase of a learning and development cycle, co-build the assessment with learners for how they'll demonstrate their mastery of the focus skills you're working on, and by proxy the effectiveness of your coaching. Frame these assessments as opportunities for learners to understand for themselves what they still need to work on, share with them the research about how testing is one of the most tried-and-true ways to really learn, and be explicit about disconnecting evaluation from the assessment.
4) Build in time for self-assessment -- Plan in intentional opportunities for learners to step back and assess their progress. And don't wait until the end to do it. Ask learners halfway through a learning and development session, "What have you learned about how to approach this challenge so far? What would you adjust if you were to do it again?" Then, ask them at the end, "What takeaways do you have about how you approach this situation? What would you do differently next time if faced with a similar challenge? What transferable takeaways do you have for your leadership?" Give people time to synthesize their learnings, record them, and then call back to them when you check in with them next.
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Marsalis used to say that effective practice happened only when the learner willingly sacrificed sounding good. Because if you're sounding good, you're not actually practicing the difficult parts that make you better.
We could all do a little more as leaders to help our people sound a little less good in practice in order to sound a whole lot better when they have to perform.
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