Adaptive Thinking, Deliberate Practice, and Complexity

In military parlance, the term Adaptive Thinking has been used to describe the cognitive behavior of an officer who is confronted by unanticipated circumstances during the execution of a planned military operation. It refers to the thinking a leader must do to adapt operations to the requirements of unfolding events and is thus a key component of competency in battle command. Adaptive Thinking is a behavior.

(Source: Think Like a Commander.PDF)  

I discussed the need for Adaptive Thinking in this earlier post as well. I mentioned that Adaptive Thinking that promotes adaptive expertise is what makes us learners, takes us out of our preconceived notions formed by our domain expertise, and allows us to probe and respond to changing situations with greater elasticity. In short, this helps us to deal with complex situations.

The article Think Like a Commander takes an in-depth look at Adaptive Thinking and how it can be “taught”. Here, by taught I am trying to imply that Adaptive Thinking can be acquired. It can be acquired through deliberate, focused practice. 

This post is a summary of the key learnings from the article. I have paraphrased liberally from the article. The interpretations, however, are mine and any errors in understanding associated with those are entirely mine.

The Adaptive Thinking Training Methodology (ATTM) and Think Like a Commander (TLAC) represent a method and tool for training adaptive leaders.

1.   Adaptive Thinking focuses on training how to think rather than what to think.
2. Adaptive Thinking is different from lateral, creative or out-of-the box thinking. It is defined by the conditions under which it occurs. The conditions or constraints need to be taken into account and a solution sought within that. This is also the hallmark of a creative problem-solver, one who is unfazed by constraints but adapts herself/himself to get the maximum benefit out of the situation.   
3. Adaptive Thinking, as the term implies, indicates thinking while performing. This is different from thinking in an environment of calm reflection. This is why it becomes important to develop Adaptive Thinking skills through deliberation. Under conditions of stress, it is human nature to react automatically, using approaches that come most naturally and effortlessly.

Hence, the military where situations can change their course within the blink of an eye train leaders and decision-makers on Adaptive Thinking skills. Expertise in Adaptive Thinking develops out of deliberate practice, which is at the heart of ATTM. 

Deliberate practice has the following characteristics: 

(Source: Think Like a Commander.PDF)  

1. Repetition: Task performance occurs repetitively rather than at its naturally occurring frequency. A goal of deliberate practice is to develop habits that operate expertly and automatically.
2. Focused feedback: Coaches/trainers are at hand to provide corrective feedback and help the learners model their behaviors.
3. Immediacy of performance: After corrective feedback on performance, there is an immediate repetition so that the task can be performed more in accordance with expert norms.
4. Stop and start: Because of the repetition and feedback, deliberate practice is typically seen as a series of short performances rather than a continuous flow. This series of iterative, feedback-driven practice instills confidence and takes away the stress.
5. Emphasis on difficult aspects: Deliberate practice will focus on more difficult aspects. E.g., rarely occurring emergencies can be exercised frequently in deliberate practice.  
6. Focus on areas of weakness: Deliberate practice can be tailored to the individual and focus on areas of weakness.
7. Conscious focus: In deliberate practice, the learner may consciously attend to the element because improving performance at the task is more important in this situation than performing one’s best.
8. Work vs play: Characteristically, deliberate practice feels more like work and is more effortful than casual performance. The motivation generally comes from a sense that one is improving in skill.
9. Active Coaching: Typically, a coach must be very active during deliberate practice, monitoring performance, assessing adequacy, and controlling the structure of training.

Therefore, it is characteristic of deliberate practice to focus on behavior on does not do well; while during actual performance such behaviors are avoided as far as possible.

Now the question remains, how will this help knowledge workers deal with complex and chaotic challenges that are unprecedented? 

This is precisely the aim of Adaptive Thinking. It focuses on training how to think and what to think about rather than what to think. By including deliberate practice, ATTM ensures that leaders become comfortable with the approach. The situations can and will change but someone trained to “think on their feet” will be able to handle complexity with greater ease. 

In today’s workplace where Knowledge Work is characterized by:

• Complexity
• Ambiguity
• Novelty
• Diversity (of opinions, people, issues, domains, technology, etc.)
• Information overload coupled with “not exactly what I need” syndrome
• Vanishing shelf-life of knowledge

Adaptive Thinking seems to be one of the keys to handling the onslaught. I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Please leave your response to the post.

Consultation/Training Needs Analysis checklist

These are some thought-starter questions and by no means an exhaustive list...part of an exercise in my attempt to collate my scattered bits of writing...

I have found the questions below useful to ask when analyzing an organization's readiness/need for e-learning. I have jotted them down as they occurred to me and are in no ways very refined. These will need several iterations to reach some measure of perfection...

The Pre-Training/Consultation/Training Needs Analysis checklist could be something like this:

1. What is the nature of the business the organization is in?
2. What is the strength of the organization?
3. Is the organization globally spread?
4. Is there a stated training need, i.e., has clear areas of performance gaps been identified by the LoB manager/training department?
5. How is this “improvement in performance” perceived to impact the organization’s bottom line?
6. Can this training requirement be fulfilled by e-learning alone? If not, what could be the other possible solutions?
7. What is the organization’s current mode of training and how “successful” has it been? What is the gap that is being sought to be fulfilled.

If e-learning is a viable option, then it is important to find out:

1. Has the organization experienced e-learning before?
2. Will employees get sufficient support from the organization to take the courses?
3. Does the top management believe in or is willing to open up to the e-learning approach?

If there are no defined training needs but a general feeling from the top management that some improvements are required, the situation becomes tougher. This is when IDs have to become consultants and solution architects. This would require a deep dive into the processes, current training scenarios, the pain points that need to be bridged.

What makes analyzing difficult is the complicated issue of measuring ROI. It is not really possible to do a one-on-one mapping of a training program—be it e-learning, ILT, blended, etc.—with the performance. I’ll keep that as a new topic of discussion…

The learning solution must be effective enough within a constrained budget and time-line. We all know what we could do if we had more time, if the client opened his wallet a bit more, and all other ideal situations. However, our consultancy and design thinking skills comes to the forefront when we can deliver effective programs within the defined constraints.

This is where, as consultants, we have to blend project planning with solution thinking. I believe such challenges force us to think creatively and out of the box to come up with better time and cost effective solutions.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. What are some of the specific challenges you have faced? How did you overcome them? What were some of the creative measures adopted? What key questions are missing from the list?

Training, Instruction and Education...we need 'em all...

This was written almost a year ago...but re-posting it here...

I just finished reading Telling Ain't Training by Harold J. Stolovitch and Erica J. Keeps. I am going to quote them liberally in my response here. This book, incidentally, is a must read for all trainers, HR professionals and anyone remotely interested in understanding the nature of learning and in making a difference through training and instruction.

Purpose of Training:
1. To create a change
2. To make certain behaviors automatic
3. To enable the trainee/learner to apply as is to real-world situations
4. To enable learners to produce learned behavior with fewer errors, greater speed and under more demanding conditions
5. To focus ONLY on what is the performance outcome desired

Just being able to follow training guidelines and perform perfectly is not a necessary condition for survival; hence, the need for instruction.

Purpose of Instruction:
1. To help learners generalize beyond the specifics of what is taught
2. To apply learned behavior to similar but maybe not the exact same situation
3. To enable learners to act thoughtfully
4. To facilitate adaption of learning to each new situation

Purpose of Education:
This cannot be taught. This is an act the learner performs when s/he becomes capable--through experience, reflection, assessment--of pulling together all the strands and forming highly generalized patterns. This is directly linked to a learner's value system and outlook on life.

In Response: Accidental Instructional Designers #dl09--Part II

Mulling over the comment by Brent Schlenker: "I see New ID as being more about aggregating and monitoring the existing content streams. And identifying the critical information, highlighting it, and improving upon the media that explains or clarifies the content" in Cammy Bean's post: Accidental Instructional Designers #dl09 ...

With the ever increasing opportunities/possibilities for everyone to create content, the training design specialists face the same plight as that of journalists. Training programs may go the Conde Nast way...

User-generated content is going to be on the rise and should be encouraged. Most often, these will also be a lot quicker and a hell of a lot cheaper in providing the information needed than a full-fledged training program. Then, where do we stand as professional designers of training?

This is where I whole-heartedly agree with the comment above...An ID today must be prepared to separate the wholesome, necessary "content wheat" that will impact performance from the chaff of an endless content stream. S/he may not need to sit with an SME and create the content.



This does mean re-thinking the ID role in many cases. From my experience, today an ID needs to understand/find out:
1. If an organization already has a platform where the end users contribute to share information, knowledge, updates
2. What is the contribution rate
3. How effectively do users access/use this platform
4. What needs are being fulfilled via this platform
5. What are the gaps

This last point is where an ID can contribute by "identifying the critical information, highlighting it, and improving upon the media that explains or clarifies the content."

An ID today thus needs to also understand Information Architecture, a crucial skill pointed out by Vasan in his post.

This also means a reduced content gathering cycle, using the organization's existing knowledge base effectively and acknowledging the content generated by end users as key material for training. The latter often results in a strong buy in from end users as they see their efforts being rewarded and makes them more willing to take onus of their learning.

This also means being more aware of and proficient in the "design" of the content--design being all the factors that turn content into stimulus for learning, that tries to bring about a change in behavior through effective presentation and techniques, and most importantly, that has the learner strongly situated in the center of it all.

Telling Ain't Training: Snippet #1--Declarative and Procedural Knowledge and the Expert-Novice Divide

I have been reading the book Telling Ain’t Training by Harold D. Stolovitch and Erica J. Keeps, a combined ASTD and ISPI publication. This is a must read for all trainers, performance analysts, and learners. This is a short, seemingly easy read but packed with practical advice, analytical insights and great suggestions from these experienced trainers.

I have planned to document a few points in my blog for future reference and to capture my reaction to the book as I read it. I may also go back and revise some of these posts, but recording my thoughts now.

In this post, I am going to discuss what Harold and Erica say about declarative and procedural knowledge and the novice-expert divide.

Here is a graphic for reference:



Declarative knowledge is about describing how things are done, what we see, and what we know. This is a uniquely human skill. No other living being is capable of describing what they do or know, they “just” do.

Procedural knowledge is about “doing.” It is, as the term implies, the process of doing, like typing without looking at the keyboard, cycling, driving.

The expert-novice divide
Most experts “know” how to do something (whatever it is that they are deemed to be experts in). They have acquired this expertise over the years by doing, by applying.

With increasing expertise, their views of situations and ability to assimilate, analyze, synthesize evolve and change. They begin to “see” the world differently from a novice.

For an expert, the information coming their way is grouped in larger and larger interconnected bits. Whereas, a novice gets mired in the details because, for them, each piece of information is a separate bit. They soon go into information overload mode without a clue as to how to connect the small pieces to arrive at the big picture. Their short-time memory rapidly fills with disjointed bits of relevant and irrelevant information in equal abandon.



When does the divide occur?

When an expert is expected to convey information to a novice in a manner that will enable the latter to translate that information into performance output.

For great examples, you must read the original.

The experts are what the authors of Made to Stick call, “Cursed with Knowledge.” They are unable to view the world from the perspective of a novice who receives and processes the same information very differently. It is very difficult to imagine what it is like not to know once you know, if you know what I mean.

So, when an organization takes an SME (the formal term for experts) and asks them to communicate their knowledge to the novices and hopes for performance improvement, there is a major gap although both the sides are trying very hard.

The information flows somewhat in this manner:




Can this change?

Yes, it can and this is where, we as Performance Analysts and Instructional Designers come in as facilitators in the process.



“Learnable” information is a term I use to describe that which is not about “telling and transmission, but about training and transformation” and performance.

In my next post, I will describe how declarative knowledge can be transformed into “learnable” information that can impact performance.

Reflection Point

Below is an image showing a few examples of how declarative knowledge can be coded to become "learnable" information.



Watch this space for more snippets from Telling Ain't Training.

Training Must Be Inconsistent!!!

Consistency in training is one of the advantages of e-learning, we claim, as opposed to a human facilitator who could be tired, irritable, not in the mood, or just not well versed with the subject s/he is conducting the training on.

In comparison, once an e-learning program is created, it comes with the following advantages:
Easy dissemintation
Wide reach
Self paced...blah blah blah
And CONSISTENT

An e-learning program does not have mood swings or give in to frailties of the body. It will behave in the same way even if you click the Next button at wee hours of the night...

It is always blessedly consistent. But what is the nature of this consistency?

Two questions I think of importance are:

1. Is this consistency to do with the presentation style?
2. Is this consistency related to the message/information being communicated?
3. Have we somehow confused/conflated consistency with quality?

Let's take the questions one by one.

1. Is this consistency to do with presentation style?

Just imagine a few f2f training sessions where a trainer is "perfectly consistent"--always saying the same things, presenting the same information in the same way, asking the same questions, carrying out each step flawlessly. Each of his/her sessions are perfect replicas of each other.

Are you shuddering with horror? Probably. How BORING you are saying. What about the learners and their different learning styles. A good trainer has to take into account different learner types and mould his/her sessions accordingly. A good trainer is flexible, intuitive, moving with the learners. To make his/her sessions impactful, s/he MUST BE INCONSISTENT.

I am a learning professional and am absolutely for e-learning. This brings us to question #2.

2. Is this consistency related to the message/information being communicated?
I think when we speak about consistency, it is important to clarify its attributes. In e-learning, consistency IS an advantage. And consistency does not mean the same presentation style all the time, for all learners. This is where e-learning has the advantage.

With sufficient Learner Analysis, it is possible to design programs that take into account different learning styles.

With e-learning, it is easier to design a program that has multiple entry points.
Imagine a program that has 3 entry points:
>An audio-visual
>A quiz
>An introductory write-up with diagrams

The learner analysis has shown that learners are a fair mix of the Auditory, the Visual, and the Kinesthetic types.

It is easy to guess which learner type would opt for which kind of entry points. The advantage of course is that any learner can choose to opt for all three and experience the same information presented differently.

Consistency then is not about presentation. Consistency is about:
~Communicating the same information without any loss of key points and emphasis
~Ensuring the same outcome and proficiency level for all learner types post the program
~Ensuring different learner types and learning styles are accomodated in the program design always, consistently
~Implementing multiple learning pathways in programs for maximum efficacy and impact
~Being consistently inconsistent and considering each learner as an individual

These are some of my thoughts. I would love to know more from you.

I am leaving my 3rd question with the hope you will help me with the answer.

Have we somehow confused/conflated consistency with quality?

Education v. Training: My response

bozarthzone: Education v. Training

I like one of the comments to this post which says, "Maybe it's time we stop thinking about training and education as two ends of a heirarchy and begin to think of them as equally valid parts of a nonlinear process called "learning"."

I think so too. Training is outward performance focussed with measurable outcome and immediate applicability.

Training programs are typically created for some or all of the following "well-known" reasons:(using some typical corporate training needs analysis jargon here)

My top five reasons as to why corporate organizations invest in training programs:

1. To bridge performance gap
2. To achieve business goal
3. To maintain a competitive edge
4. To retain and grow inhouse talent (cheaper in recessionary times than hiring experts)
5. Sometimes, to be seen as an organization that focuses on its people

Most often, the reasons for creating/implementing training programs are a blend of all the points above in varying degrees of proportion.

In my next post, I will attempt to put down the attributes of a training program vs. education (learning).