Chalk X

Summary:

• There are differences in skill mastery between knowing, doing, and being. This is analogous to watching a cooking show vs. cooking at home vs being a chef. 
• When learning a new skill we don’t know it until we do it. 
• Due to Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve we lose information we don’t use. 
• Practice makes perfect but trying new things makes you an expert.
• I know, I can, I am.

The knowing-doing gap is well known in the business world thanks to Jeffery Pfeffer and Robert Sutton’s great book published back in 2000. But we know this to be true in our lives as well. There is a huge difference between knowing how to do something and actually doing it. 

The example that comes to mind is we can watch a cooking show but there is a huge gap between watching that show and getting the ingredients and trying it for ourselves. In that process and business we realize that there is a huge knowing-doing gap. Or perhaps more aptly for me a thinking-you-know-what-your-doing-wait-is-that-a-fire gap.

Knowing

I have taught various groups of people throughout my career. I have created and taught programming, design, product management, and agile coaching classes. Through that process I have learned that: 

1. You can always learn more than you currently know. 
2. Every skill technical or otherwise requires practice to understand.
3. Practicing a skill in a classroom is enough to know enough to start but just barely. 
4. Teaching is a skill that follows the above pattern as well. 

In Doug Lemov’s amazing book Teach Like a Champion, now in its third version, he outlines what he and his team have learned from expert teachers across the world. One of the things discussed is how to achieve mastery. Mastery is a step beyond doing. To paraphrase the three consistent steps Lemov describes in achieving mastery for a student are:

1. Demonstrate to the class
2. Do together as a class, answering questions. 
3. Individual practice while the teacher coaches as necessary. 

This may seem simple but it is quite profound. You can see this in any sport. The coach demonstrates, you run drills together, you go and practice on your own. At this point you are doing the skill. If you do it enough it becomes ingrained, like riding a bicycle. 

Doing

How often in business/life do we learn something new, it resonates, and then it dissolves. The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve shows that we forget data quickly without use or repetition. Further part of what we know we only gather from doing what we know. The knowledge of doing will be forgotten without repetition. We know this in sports or playing a musical instrument, it is called practice. We need to do this with all knowledge to ingrain it, but forget this is true of other skills. 

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment

– Dr. Kerr L White.

1. We have made mistakes in the doing and learned to mitigate them before they happen. 
2. Bad judgment comes from when we are trying something new, it is hard to grow without it. 
3. We also start to understand the fundamentals of why things worked in the first place. 

Being

To be an expert we have to practice what we know but we also have to grow. 

One way to stretch knowledge is to teach. The best chef’s in the world always have apprentices. In business, leaders will typically mentor others. The mentor grows just as much as the mentee. 

Why? 

Let’s consider the teaching process again from the teacher’s point of view. 

1. Demonstrate –
   • This means you have to truly be comfortable in the act of doing, you can’t still be learning the basics to demonstrate it effectively. 
2. Do together as a class, answering questions.
   • This will test your knowledge as much as it will help theirs. Their questions may give you new insights that you hadn’t thought of before. 
3. Individual practice while the teacher coaches as necessary.
   • The way people “do” the lesson will vary wildly. Their variance is a learning opportunity for you. 

You don’t reach this state until you, and most importantly others, identify yourself as “being a <insert_skill_here>”. “I am a chef” is a very different statement than, “I like to cook”. 

Once we get into our professional life, it isn’t uncommon for people to feel like we’ve learned all we need to from school. There may be a feeling that we don’t need to practice a skill because we have the job. But that isn’t true with other skills that are more objective for people to assess. How good would a basketball player stay if they didn’t practice? How talented would a musician be if they didn’t practice? 

Usage:

• When reading a book/article, write down at least 1 key thought. Try and use that information at least once in the following week. 
• After getting good at a skill, find out how to share it with others. 
• Figure out a way to practice your skill even if it isn’t “game day”. Ex. Software developers can hit cycles where they are attending more meetings than coding, but there are tools on the web to practice (LeetCode, Codewars, or search for Code Katas)
• Learn a brand new skill that you’ve been interested in. That learning will be incorporated with your existing knowledge.