Accelerate off the plateau
What’s your memory like? Mine is far from perfect, especially for names and faces: let me take the opportunity to apologise in advance to anybody I haven’t seen during the long lockdown, and who I fail to recognise when we meet again. If you see me with a polite smile and a confused look, I am probably trying to jolt my memory into action.
In his book Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer attempted to answer the question of how to improve his memory, and ended up competing in the U.S. Memory Championships. To do this he had to train hard to master various events, such as memorising random lists of binary digits, long poems word for word, and the order of multiple packs of playing cards. I found many interesting ideas in Foer’s book about the history of memory, the techniques used to improve memory, and about talent and expertise. There is one particular idea, though, that made me think about how we develop throughout our careers, and the conditions that leaders must create to support that development.
Despite months of training, Foer found that he reached a point where his speed at memorising a pack of playing cards was not improving. When he asked his coach for help, he was referred to research about how people acquire new skills. I can’t do justice here to either the research or Foer’s account of it, but the conclusion is that, when we train ourselves in new skills, we reach a point of comfort, which Foer calls the ‘OK plateau’. At this level of expertise, our skills are good enough to achieve what we want most of the time, and have become sufficiently ingrained and automatic that we do not consciously focus on their improvement. I believe that we have all had this experience with everyday skills such as driving: I think that I have been an OK driver for many years, but am certainly no better than average, and do not consciously work on improving my driving.
Foer found from his research that people who achieve high levels of skill in a particular discipline often adopt a training regime which moves them away from this point of comfort: they find mechanisms which push them a bit further than their autonomous abilities can keep up with. This forces them to work consciously on their performance - until the new level of skill becomes the next plataeu. It also means experiencing a period of failure and frustration, and accepting this as the price for improved performance. Adopting this approach helped Foer break out of his rut on card memorisation and go on to . . . but you should read the book to find out how he did.
I think that we can learn two lessons from this at work.
Firstly, as individuals, we should recognise that, if we have skills we want to improve, we are likely to reach a point where we cannot improve them further purely through practice - if that practice is simply repetition of what we have already mastered. We must find a way to push ourselves further, to the point where we are conscious of what we are doing, and the effort we must take to improve. If we are serious about this, it is more than just following the cliche of ‘getting out of our comfort zone’: it is a programme of what Foer describes as ‘deliberate practice’. This, of course, takes effort and energy, and we must be certain that it is something that we really want.
Second, for those of us in leadership positions, we must remember that our team members rarely have opportunities to practice in a consequence free environment. Foer could practice memorisation in a private room, with blinkers and headphones to avoid distraction, with no consequence for failure other than his own frustration. In business, it is almost impossible to avoid distraction, and when we go wrong it has an impact.
This does not mean, though, that we should not encourage deliberate practice which takes risks with performance. On the contrary, it means that, as leaders, we should create the environment where people can attempt to operate beyond their ‘OK plateau’ and accept that this will sometimes result in failure. We should be prepared to pay the price of improvement as much as our team members.
