Why ten years of experience may not be much better than two

Summary: most people have over 10 years experience in a field of work, like the 10-year rule requires for world-class excellence. Most employees, however, are far from 'world-class'. It is, of course, possible that employees, like normal people, just get stuck in routines that are good enough for practical purposes, but certainly not optimal, as I discussed in my last post. However, this seems odd for companies to condone, as they put a premium on top performance. Still, if we look closely at companies, it becomes less and less surprising why learning to excel in one's work can be so hard.

Most people, especially in more traditional callings, have worked many thousands of hours at it. Yet only a very small minority is considered to really excel. Is this because of innate talents, or something else? In my previous post I discussed how mere repetition of action sequences may not in itself lead to mastery, as one needs a constant drive for improvement to really eliminate poor habits and replace them with better ways of doing things. Unfortunately, in companies, there seem to be several factors making the life of the self-improving employee harder than it could be.

1) despecialization. In contrast to sportspeople and artists, most employees in a regular company need to be more or less multifunctional. Consider a manager at a medium-sized company. The manager needs to have a decent understanding of both the global goal of his (or her) division, as well as knowing the basics of what the people and machinery can and cannot do. He must be proficient in dealing with his subordinates, as well as in dealing with his superordinates (which are different skill sets – billionaire steel baron Andrew Carnegie was great at cozying up to his superiors, but too impatient and demanding to be an efficient supervisor for his workmen). A good manager must also be a great networker, keep an eye on the future of the industry, and be good at written communication and giving presentations. And doubtlessly there are many more subjobs that I am forgetting to mention here. A typical individual might reach high levels in one (or perhaps two) of these skills, but excelling in all of them is probably impossible.

2) lack of time. In many cases, learning and exercising is seen as an unproductive way to spend time (which, I admit, may have to do with too many poorly designed training courses). However, the results of not investing in employee skills are especially apparent in underpaid jobs like schoolteaching (at least in the Netherlands); there simply is no time available for training the teachers, and no extra buffer time during regular work hours in which they can try out new behaviours, which are always slower in the beginning; time pressures too easily lead a budding improvement to be abandoned for the old, less effective, but automated and hence faster method. Compare it to learning to type with ten fingers - how many people (ehm... like me) abandon their training because it takes too long to become proficient at it, while working pressures and deadlines are mounting?

3) risk avoidance. Companies, understandably, don't like failure since it tends to cost them money, as well as reputation (which may cost them even more money by not getting future assignments). Therefore, many companies opt for 'overkill'- they hire someone so competent, or make the task so easy, that the employee will not easily fail. Unfortunately, the old saying, 'if you never fail, you aren't aiming high enough', is true, for lack of failure produces lack of feedback. If Tiger Woods had practiced his putting near a golf hole 1 m in diameter, he might have shot many more hole-in-ones, but he would not have become such a great golfer. There are, admittedly, very good reasons why companies don't want their employees to fail ever – unfortunately, this wish can interfere with the other goal of having people excel.

4) 'impossible' jobs. Some jobs, such as stock market prediction, may be inherently unlearnable. For other jobs, the information to reach a good decision may be too expensive (or even impossible) to obtain. There are also limits on the things that even the best practitioner can do - even the best doctors cannot cure metastatized lung cancer (in most if not all cases), since medical science has not found the cure yet. There will always be a gap between the performance of a beginner and the maximal theorical performance possible; if this gap is small, however, expertise won't help much at all.

5) Lack of feedback. If a worker in a DVD-player factory systematically places a certain screw wrong, and it would get the player broken in 10 years, probably no one would notice this error or correct him for it. And without any feedback, no learning takes place. It may very well be that the banking crisis was brought upon us because of the people who approved the loans were different people than those who had to mop up the damage after the bad loans defaulted. Such lack of feedback could cause the 'loaners' to smugly give out more loans in the assurance that their judgement was infallible.

6) Variation over time. Most people slowly change jobs in a company (get promoted, usually) or their work changes. The more their work changes, the less their previous knowledge helps. Essentially, they need to start over and over again to learn a new jobs all of the time, which may prevent them from ever accumulating enough skill to be an expert in any one of them.

All this, however, does not mean that companies are bad places to be; companies have probably contributed more to human wellfare than all the geniuses in the Encyclopedia Brittanica combined (or at the very least made it possible to have the geniuses' discoveries touch the lives of us all). The contributions of many great workers are unfortunately seldom recognized, probably due to the distribution of the work which often makes it impossible to assign an invention or a performance to one person alone. Nevertheless, the strengths and weaknesses of companies can teach us a lot about human learning. To that learning I will return soon, but first for something a bit different, coming Tuesday 6-4-'10.


*this post is greatly indebted to Geoff Colvin, and his book "Talent is overrated". Geoff Colvin treats the reasons why companies are often such poor training grounds in more elaborate detail than I can do here. His suggestions for improving the situation are a bit more tentative, but they certainly warrant a later discussion.