WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT EXPERTISE

Famous performers like Yehudi Menuhin, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Robert de Castella, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Cathy Freeman, famous composers like Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Adams, Shostakovich, and so many others, we are accustomed to calling these people ‘gifted’. They were lucky enough to have these ‘gifts’ and the rest of us admire and enjoy watching and listening but few of us think that we could be like them. Whether they are leaders like Nelson Mandela, businessmen like Richard Branson, scientists like Einstein, engineers, mathematicians, or biologists, we have come to speak of them as special people and not like the rest of us.

In the early 20th century, psychologists such as Alfred Binet, Theodore Simon, Lewis Terman, and David Wechsler and many others developed and refined psycho-metric tests for intelligence and mental ability (such as the IQ, intelligence quotient, test). They were trying to find ways to predict which people would become outstand-ing performers. These tests continue to be developed today and those of you who have applied for jobs with large corporations may have encountered them. Many human

resources experts and companies use these tests to try and select the best performing future leaders.

Throughout the 20th century, there were endless debates about intelligence: is it the result of natural selection, a genetic inheritance? Or is intelligence the result of careful nurturing, attention from parents and teachers? Or does the place in which a child is reared or the people the child grows up with and the home environment determine it?

Towards the end of the 20th century it was widely accepted that intelligence, whether it is measured by tests or academic grades, is the best determinant of future performance. It was assumed that the ability to solve classic mathematical problems, such as the Tower of Hanoi, was a predictor of expert performance at much more complex problems.

But 21st century research tells us a different story.¹

Education psychologists gradually realised that expectation plays a much greater part in human learning than we previously imagined. Children who are told that they are talented outperform children who are told that they are less able than the rest, even though they have the same intrinsic ability.

Other education psychologists realised that practice and tutoring play a much larger role than had previously been imagined. The psychologists who had developed intelligence tests had carefully removed tasks from their tests that involved perception, memory, and judgement precisely because they found that the results of these were affected by practice. The psychologists were interested only in measuring ‘innate’ men-tal ability because they thought that human beings were differentiated by the measure of the abilities that they were born with.

Towards the end of the 20th century, psychologists and cognitive scientists started to study outstanding performers to try and understand what differentiates experts from the rest of us. Ericsson and his colleagues started with musicians while others studied chess players and typists. As early as 1946, Adrian de Groot started to realise that chess grandmasters were somehow able to choose better moves in a game of chess than others who were not quite as good. He gradually came to the conclusion that it was thousands of hours of practice that enabled grandmasters to better predict the course of the game as well as provide them with a wider choice of moves at any given stage.

Later, Chase and Simon found that expert chess players were better able to recall the positions of pieces on a chessboard that they had been shown for a few seconds, but only if the chess pieces were in positions that had resulted from a real game of chess.

If the pieces were positioned randomly, there was much less difference in their ability to remember. The experts’ memory came from practicing chess games, time after time after time. Memory improves with practice.

Ericsson and his colleagues found that the largest factor predicting the performance of musicians was a certain kind of practice that they called ‘deliberate practice’. First, they found that a combination of motivation and practice alone did not necessarily lead to the best level of performance. The motivation was needed because practice is not easy: it takes effort and determination to work systematically on improving the skills that are needed for high levels of performance. They found that achieving the highest level of performance required not only motivation and practice, but also a search for

techniques that resulted in higher levels of performance both in the underlying skills and their effective combination.

Expert tutors could make a large contribution as well; these were people who could watch and listen to a performance and identify the need to improve certain techniques. They found that experts actively seek these tutors for one-on-one feedback and guidance.

Finally, the performers themselves had to have the ability to evaluate their own performance. As they were practising they were constantly observing their own perfor-mance and trying out alternative techniques in a search for improvement. Sometimes this resulted in frustration and temporary setbacks. However, with enough determina-tion, an expert performer could overcome these difficulties to reach still higher levels of performance. Most experts required at least ten years to reach their ultimate level of performance, at which point they achieved a state of ‘effortless mastery’ (sometimes called a state of ‘flow’ by other researchers).

By 2003, Ericsson and his colleagues had extended their studies to physical per-formance, involving gymnasts and basketball players, and cognitive tasks such as mathematics and problem solving. They found that even when experts perform at a routine level (i.e. not the highest that they can achieve) their performances are more consistent and reliable than those who are considered less of an expert. They found that experts develop special perceptual abilities that enable them to be aware of very subtle differences. This gives them the ability to remember better and instantly adapt or select an appropriate response that enables them to look ahead and anticipate better than others. The ability to look ahead allows experts to perform faster than others.

Experts still make mistakes, but they are able to hide them by effective improvisation so that the observer does not notice and the expert avoids making them again through subsequent practice.

Ericsson and his colleagues concluded that the acquisition of expert performance relies fundamentally on deliberate practice. In essence, this is a continual process of problem solving in order to seek techniques that lead to even higher levels of per-formance. They have estimated that it usually takes around 10,000 hours of such practice. Given the effort needed, especially in the early stages, learners can only tol-erate between 20 and 40 minutes of such practice every day. With the help of tutors, encouragement from parents, friends, and peers, and in many cases, inspiration from a chance meeting with a role model, gradually the learner can increase the amount of deliberate practice. For most people it takes at least ten years to achieve an expert level of performance. Normal routine work rarely provides the opportunity for delib-erate practice: work performance has to meet employer expectations and can’t easily be adapted to the needs of practice. For most people, deliberate practice has to be a spare time, after-hours devotion.

Although researchers are still far from certain, the evidence accumulated so far has failed to find any definite link between the acquisition of expert performance and genetic inheritance, innate ability, or intellectual ability as measured by intel-ligence tests and other similar instruments. However, there are some exceptions.

For example, expert basketball players tend to be taller people and expert gym-nasts tend to be shorter people: inherited physical characteristics do confer certain advantages.