Work smart. Not hard

Hard work by itself has a halo around it. Often the pursuit of making a living supersedes the quest for expertise and excellence

Sometime ago, a friend relocated from the US to Mumbai. He had a couple of gas guzzlers in the US and driving around was second nature to him. That he could drive in India as well was a rather tall assumption he made. Indian roads and cars were quite unlike the ones he had come prepared for. Driving was an important part of his stay here. He had no choice but to learn. Every evening he used to drive around in my car. With me sitting by his side, calming his frayed nerves. 

Every move, every gear shift, would be done with complete focus. We did that for a couple of weeks. Soon he was good to drive all by himself. Driving in India is now second nature to him.

Noël Burch of Gordon Training International developed a four-stage model that explains this behaviour, or what goes into building competence in any skill. 

a. Unconscious incompetence (My friend not knowing that he didn’t know the nuances of driving in India)

b. Conscious incompetence (My friend becoming conscious of the fact that he has to work on it)

c. Conscious competence (Him consciously working on it)

d. Unconscious competence (Now that he knows, it is second nature).

Everybody would like unconscious competence. Who doesn’t want to “unconsciously stay on top of the game”?

But what we ought to think about is: when you engage in a task in an automated manner, does it really build expertise? Short answer: no. Areas we want to build expertise in requires a different approach.

In 1993, Anders Ericsson and a team of psychologists published a wonderful research paper, ‘The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance’. Here, he introduced the idea of “deliberate practice”.

Practice, he argued, has to be “deliberate” and cannot be “automised”. The hours that go into practice is the base. The “unconscious competence” zone that Burch described is where automated repetition becomes reality. And that is what we ought to avoid. Question is how.

A couple of years ago, an entrepreneur friend of mine sought help. He needed some ideas to stoke his fresh entrepreneurial journey. Offering to host a round of conversations, he got a set of disparate friends to gather every Saturday evening at his office and talk. For about 45 minutes, he would describe a particular industry that he had deconstructed from a few balance sheets, anecdotal evidence, first person accounts and the like. We’d listen, share our opinions and he’d absorb all of it in. Every week, it was a different company or industry.

As much as the conversations were rich, I was intrigued by what was happening. It turned out that he was told off by a venture capitalist for a lack of “business perspective” despite having sound technical skills.

His conversations with a few others led him to believe that deconstructing industries and organizations was one way of learning and integrating different angles.

Four industries in four weeks. That was his target. He would read up on the industry, make notes and then deconstruct balance sheets of at least two organizations in the business.

Over two quarters, his understanding of what constituted the pulse of his own business changed dramatically. All of this, of course, was in addition to nurturing his fledgling enterprise.

This is deliberate practice. He was driven to put in the extra hours. He put aside his ego—that which comes from being a successful technology professional. He dived deep to acknowledge areas beyond him. Most importantly, he stayed alive to all feedback.

Hard work by itself has a halo around it. Often the pursuit of making a living supersedes the quest for expertise and excellence. Pausing to think about what we do, pondering on how we could possibly get better, and actively be present to feedback can make the world around us a better place.

It reminds me of the time many years ago when my dad would conjure up tricks to entice me to do household work. Cleaning windows was one such.

One bright summer day, when the windows were to be cleaned, I woke up early, and armed myself with “equipment”—buckets, brushes, cloth, detergent liquid and such. At the appointed hour, dad parted the curtains and we were witnesses to dead houseflies next to the glass panes. He looked at me and asked how they got there. “It surely wasn’t me,” I remember telling him.

The flies, he said, were attracted to light. So much so that they were willing to give it all they had to get to it. So what if the glass pane came in their way the first time? They just went back, did an elaborate sortie of sorts and tried again. And again. Until their heads couldn’t take the repeated crashes. “Then they die.”

His point was simple. The flies weren’t lazy. They worked hard and long on making those sorties. But doing the same thing many times over is not the way to get to the light. “If only they could ‘think’,” he said.

For many years, as I chose to approach challenges and dilemmas with the “halo of hard practice”, he would quip “Why don’t you think about the problem?” A pause later, he’d add, “You remember the dead flies on the window sill don’t you?”

Source | Mint – The Wall Street Journal | 1 September 2