Accelerated Expertise

Training for High Proficiency in a Complex World

Robert R. Hoffman, Paul Ward, Paul J. Feltovich, Lia DiBello, Stephen M. Fiore, Dee H. Andrews

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135083304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sviluppo di business
• Index: Business

Speed in acquiring the knowledge and skills to perform tasks is crucial. Yet, it still ordinarily takes many years to achieve high proficiency in countless jobs and professions, in government, business, industry, and throughout the private sector. There would be great advantages if regimens of training could be established that could accelerate the achievement of high levels of proficiency. This book discusses the construct of 'accelerated learning.' It includes a review of the research literature on learning acquisition and retention, focus on establishing what works, and why. This includes several demonstrations of accelerated learning, with specific ideas, plans and roadmaps for doing so. The impetus for the book was a tasking from the Defense Science and Technology Advisory Group, which is the top level Science and Technology policy-making panel in the Department of Defense. However, the book uses both military and non-military exemplar case studies.

It is likely that methods for acceleration will leverage technologies and capabilities including virtual training, cross-training, training across strategic and tactical levels, and training for resilience and adaptivity.

This volume provides a wealth of information and guidance for those interested in the concept or phenomenon of "accelerating learning"— in education, training, psychology, academia in general, government, military, or industry.

1

The Value of Expertise and the Need to “Capture” Knowledge

Overview

The purpose of this book is to provide information for anyone interested in the concept or phenomenon of “accelerating learning”—anyone in education, training, psychology, academia in general, government, military, or industry. We take the concept of skill development to the limit.

The first two chapters cover the concept of accelerated learning and different senses of accelerated learning (Chapter 2), and the notion of a proficiency scale, spanning trainee to expert levels of knowledge and skill (Chapter 3). The next three chapters (4-8) cover the main findings and theories from research on practice and the role of feedback, on transfer of training, on retention and decay of knowledge and skill, on problem-based training, and on team training. Our summaries of these literatures from psychology, education and training are just that—summaries. More could not be expected of any single book, though we have tried to be as comprehensive as practicable. Chapter 9 discusses some projects that can be understood as actual, successful demonstrations of accelerated learning, in some cases to high proficiency levels. We abstract some generalizations from those demonstrations, and use them along with conclusions from the literature reviews, in the following chapters (11-15). We present a theory of expertise and high-end learning that might be useful in framing accelerated learning concepts and research. We discuss the research challenges for any attempt to demonstrate or study accelerated learning. We provide a roster of the skills and capabilities that must be instilled for accelerated learning to high proficiency levels. We discuss the nature of the materials and teaching strategies that would be required for successful accelerated learning, and then we conclude with a notional roadmap for projects on accelerated learning to high proficiency.

We begin with a discussion of why accelerated learning—especially accelerated expertise— is more than a concept or phenomenon. It is a pressing societal need.

Workforce Issues

In recent years there has been wide recognition in the business community of the importance of knowledge capture, preservation, and sharing in knowledge-based organizations. Largely this is in response to the coming “grey tsunami”—the imminent retirement of senior experts in business and government (see Hoffman & Hanes, 2003; Moon, Hoffman, & Ziebell, 2009). Many organizations (e.g., DoD, NASA, the electric utilities) are at risk because the impending absence of soon-to-be-retired yet highly skilled domain practitioners may result in inadequate preparation for how to deal with some of the most difficult and mission-critical challenges (Hoffman & Hanes, 2003). A number of recent books, both edited and authored, both academic and popular press, have discussed the training issues and workforce challenges that have emerged as organizations have become more “knowledge-based” and technologies more pervasive in shaping complex cognitive work (e.g., Davenport & Prusak, 1998; Ericsson, 2009; Goldstein & Ford, 2001; Kraiger, 2001; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; O’Dell & Grayson, 1998; Quiñones & Ehrenstein, 1996). The modern workplace has been dubbed “sociotechnical” in recognition of the fact that the work involves collaborative mixes of multiple people and multiple machines (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989; Druckman & Bjork, 1991; Hoffman & Militello, 2008). This characterizes both military and civilian work settings and activities.

Domain practitioners who achieve high levels of proficiency provide technical judgment to speed decision-making in time-critical events. They provide resilience to operations by resolving tough problems, anticipating future demands and re-planning, and acting prudently byjudgment rather than by rule. High proficiency practitioners exercise effective technical leadership in ambiguous or complex situations, often by communicating subtle features that other people will not see until they are pointed out. Often they are also the ones who understand the history, the interdependencies of units and processes, and the culture of their complex organizations—knowledge that is often essential in actually “getting things done” (e.g., Stein, 1997).

As workplaces and jobs become more cognition-intensive, organizations need to take traditional notions of training to new levels, and well into the territory of complex systems. Workers in sociotechnical systems must be trained to be adaptive, so that they can cope with the ever-changing world and ever-changing workplace. People must be trained to be resilient, so that they can cope with complexity when unexpected events stretch resources and capabilities. And workers must be trained faster. Intelligent systems technology, and intelligent use of technology, will certainly play a critical role in this.

In the following section we use the changing face of the military, the evolving nature of the work carried out by military personnel, and the changing demands of this work to highlight some of the implications for developing effective training for achieving proficiency in this and other sociotechnical domains.

Training to High Proficiency

Training for the achievement of expertise has become a salient topic for discussion at research and technology meetings, often sponsored by military branches interested in these issues (e.g., Hszieh, Shobe, & Wulfleck, 2009). Many current jobs (estimated at 85 percent in a military context) can be trained through established methods, and those jobs involve tasks that can be performed by individuals who are proficient (Wulfleck & Wetzel-Smith, 2008). In classical guild terminology, they would be “journeymen”—they have practiced to the point where they can perform their duties unsupervised (literally, they can go on a journey). In many sociotechnical domains, there is a need for personnel who are trained at a number of levels of proficiency. While there may be some requirements for more senior experts in select areas, there is a more profound and continuing need for journeymen and senior journeymen to carry out the complex cognitive work effectively to ensure current and future success.

One reason is the constantly changing nature of work and the various jobs involved in completing that work (Quiñones & Ehrenstein, 1997). Furthermore, jobs must be adaptive to constantly changing circumstances or even threats. In a sense, everything is getting more complex and important work is often cognitive work (Wulfleck & Wetzel-Smith, 2008). Across recent decades, many workplaces have changed, and many new ones emerged, as forms of complex sociotechnical systems in which the work is cognitive and collaborative, and heavily reliant on computer technology. Work in such domains requires high levels of proficiency, in terms of knowledge, reasoning skill, and critical thinking skill. In a military context, for instance, specific domains include command posts, intelligence analysis, emergency response, disaster relief, and cyberdefense. The required preparedness status for these and other similar sociotechnical domains includes capabilities to be adaptive, resilient, and robust in the face of unexpected disruptions. This is now referred to as “cognitive readiness” (Morrison & Fletcher, 2002).

Many career paths involve training to proficiency (often, high levels of proficiency) and then reassignment for some period of time (sometimes three or more years) at some other job. This is frequently termed a “hiatus.” The classic military example is that of a pilot, trained to proficiency and tested in combat, and then assigned to duty at the Pentagon for a limited period. Temporary reassignment is commonplace (particularly in the military, and in private sector settings, such as when temporarily shifting between job roles or between work activities). This raises numerous issues in the general area of training, specifically issues of transfer, decay, and retention of knowledge and skill.

While many jobs can be trained through established methods, and such tasks can be performed by journeymen, highly proficient personnel are needed to perform domain specialist tasks (e.g., Military Warrant Officer). The bottleneck for producing such critical individuals is that it has typically taken many years of experience and deliberate practice for individuals to master their domains (e.g., see Ericsson et al., 2006). Over and over, research in the field of Expertise Studies has shown, in diverse domains from medicine to firefighting, that it takes years of extended training and experience to achieve high levels of proficiency. Reasons for this include domain complexity, irregularity across encountered cases, the need for deliberate practice, and the need for practice at tough cases—which may not be frequent in the normal course of work—to stretch the current skill level.

To elaborate on the military example further, the challenge of learning is compounded by such practices as collateral assignment, frequent redeployment (e.g., rapid skill decay on the part of pilots creates a need for expensive re-training), inadequate or ad hoc mentoring, and the drive for “just-in-time” training. Another significant challenge is clustered around career (versus job) training, and expertise retention. Professional Military Education, such as that offered by the various war colleges, is an example of career training, in which personnel learn about operational and strategic warfighting issues. The entire field of “knowledge management” is formed around the notion of preserving and sharing expertise (e.g., Becerra-Fernandez et al., 2004).

Transfer of Training and Knowledge

Transfer, or the ability to use knowledge flexibly and effectively across application areas, is an important component of proficiency. In a large respect, accelerated learning means improving transfer (and retention) capability. The major theory of transfer in learning is the “common elements” theory (e.g., Thorndike & Woodworth, 1901). Based on this idea, one would say that training should minimize the transfer distance from training to workplace. Recent research is suggestive of the conditions that promote transfer, such as the judicious use of particular kinds of process and outcome feedback (Schmidt & Bjork, 1992). However, performance issues go beyond transfer from the classroom to the operational context. Simply “working at a job” does not promote progression along the proficiency continuum (e.g., Feltovich, Preitula, & Ericsson, 2006). Unless there is continuous deliberate practice and feedback on difficult tasks or, at the very least, recurrent engagement in activities that will maintain the current level of skill, the only thing one can do “on the job” is forget and actually experience skill degradation.

Furthermore, the current challenges for training involve two different sorts of transfer. One is transfer across situations. An example would be an infantry commander, who knows how to conduct traditional warfare but is asked to develop tactics for an insurgency operation. The second challenge is transfer across responsibilities. An example would be a warfighter having a skill at maintenance of an F-16 engine who is promoted to a supervisory position. Since different skill sets would be involved, one would need to train for the new role, and not just assume that previously developed skills would transfer (or even be applicable) and constitute a sufficient basis for success in the new role. When a journeyman or expert moves from one job—where domain expertise is all that is required of them—to a supervisory job, there is an extra challenge because they are still expected to maintain their domain competence while also acquiring and performing their new supervisory duties at a level above the required threshold of proficiency.

Knowledge Management

The concept of accelerated learning has been implicit in discussions of the concept of the “expert apprentice.” The idea here is that knowledge management depends on having a workforce of proficient knowledge elicitors who are trained to be able to rapidly achieve the level of understanding of an advanced apprentice, minimally. Only by acquiring domain knowledge at that level can they contribute substantively to processes of capturing and preserving expert knowledge (Militello & Quill, 2007). The field of Knowledge Management has a theme of accelerated learning, which is not surprising given the business incentives to train faster and better. One goal, for instance, is to reduce “time to value” in product innovation. Indeed, the field of Knowledge Management has focused on issues of learning and training. This is shown by the emergence of the roles of Chief Knowledge Officer and Chief Learning Officer, and is reflected in magazine articles having titles such as “Learning at Top Speed” (Atkinson & Barry, 2010).

The early work on “expert systems” led to the vision that organizations might create large knowledge repositories (Becerra-Fernandez & Leidner, 2008). Knowledge Management software systems differ from traditional information management systems in that Knowledge Management software tools help create the very content on which they operate. Like traditional information management systems, however, there are issues of acceptance and integration into business procedures and organizational cultures.

Over the years since Gary Klein’s seminal paper on preserving corporate knowledge (1992), numerous articles and trade books have appeared bearing such titles as: If we only knew what we know (O’Dell & Grayson, 1998) and The knowledge creating company (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995) (see also Allee, 1997; Brooking, 1999; Choo, 1988; Davenport & Prusak, 1998; Lambe, 2007; Leonard & Swap, 2005). All of these discuss expertise (or “core competencies”), knowledge elicitation and knowledge repositories. These books illustrate what some see as the knowledge management craze of the late 1990s, when upwards of 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies had a Corporate Knowledge Office (Pringle, 2003). Organizations such as IBM and the World Bank have made substantial investments in support of organizational knowledge capture and management. Norman Kamilkow, Editor of Chief Learning Officer Magazine said,

What we saw was that there is a growing role for a chief learning officer type within enterprise-level companies … there is a need to have somebody focused on how to keep the skills of the corporation’s work force at a high level.

(quoted in Pringle, 2003, p. B1)

In the Knowledge Management process, company management establishes a program whereby experts who possess valuable undocumented knowledge collaborate with a knowledge engineer. Working together, they elicit the worker’s wisdom for inclusion in the organization’s knowledge base. In extreme cases, such as a senior worker retiring, the individual might be retained or brought back as a consultant (Becerra-Fernandez & Leidner, 2008).

The field of Knowledge Management raises the practical problem of knowledge finding; identifying individuals who possess knowledge that is:

1 Unique to them,

2 Critical to the organization, and

3 Tacit in the sense of being undocumented.

This has been recognized as a key to the success of Knowledge Management broadly (Gaines, 2003; Gross, Hanes, & Ayres, 2002; Hanes & Gross, 2002). Recent experience shows that it is possible and sometimes fairly easy for experts and managers, working together, to identify the unique and important knowledge areas in which a particular expert excels. Likewise, domain practitioners can readily identify those important concepts in a domain that seem to be especially difficult for others to fully comprehend (Dawson-Saunders et al., 1990). A critical gap, however, is that a robust, general procedure for doing this has not been formulated in such a way that anyone might implement it.

Knowledge-intensive organizations rely on decision-makers to produce mission-critical decisions based on inputs from multiple domains (Becerra-Fernandez et al., 2004). The decision-maker needs an understanding of many specific sub-domains that influence the decision-making process, coupled with the experience that allows for quick and decisive action based on such information (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).

An additional recent awareness is that knowledge management via knowledge capture and knowledge repositories is only a part of the solution to workforce problems.

If an organization could capture the knowledge embedded in clever people’s minds, all it would need is a better knowledge-management system. The failure of such systems to capture tacit knowledge is one of the greatest disappointments of knowledge-management initiatives to date.

(Goffee & Jon...