Have you ever tried putting deliberate practice to practice? If you have, it's likely that you'll have noticed just how difficult it is to apply deliberate practice principles to your career. Anyone that tells you otherwise is lying; here's why.| Commoncog
We take a look at how you might turn extracted, tacit expertise into a training program for yourself or others.| Commoncog
All great business people share a common, intuitive mental model of business. We look at how researcher Lia DiBello extracted that mental model.| Commoncog
A few weeks ago, I helped Amplitude head of product education John Cutler extract tacit expertise around diagnosing and improving product organisations. Here's how that went.| Commoncog
I relocated for a three month expertise acceleration experiment in Judo. These are my notes from two months in: what I learnt, what was hard, and what deliberate practice actually feels like.| Commoncog
A look at Laura Militello and Robert Hutton's Applied Cognitive Task Analysis, a simplified method for getting at the tacit expertise of others.| Commoncog
This article is a short explanation of how and when students of a new skill get mental space to think and how their basic understanding begins with rote learning. Despite the bad name rote learning gets - memorizing by heart, without a focus on understanding - I'm making the case that rote learning is the first, necessary step before understanding.| Cognition Today
Some implications of using the triad mental model of business as a North Star for learning. Part of a series on business expertise.| Commoncog
There are 3 kinds of non-fiction book: 💁♀️ narrative, 🌳 tree, and 🌿 branch. Not every non-fiction book is worth reading, and not every book should be read the same way. These categories explain why.| Commoncog
YouTube is the biggest thing to have happened to tacit skill acquisition in the past couple of decades. Here's how to use it.| Commoncog
Much of expertise is tacit: that is, it cannot be captured through words alone. We look at techniques, drawn from the field of Naturalistic Decision Making, designed to acquire the tacit knowledge of experts.| Commoncog
Much of life is about learning from experience. Not in class. Not mentorship. Not deliberate practice. And so the question: how do you learn better when it comes to learning from trial and error?| Commoncog
A lesson from a four month accelerated expertise experiment. Or: why creating new drills for a deliberate practice training program isn't as difficult as you might think.| Commoncog
What tacit knowledge is, and why it is the most interesting topic in the study of expertise today.| Commoncog
This is a combined framework of multiple memory theories that explains how we can increase memory strength and what processes get involved.| Cognition Today
Cognitive Flexibility Theory: the caveats. Also: a look at kind vs wicked learning domains, and what this tells us about building expertise in messy, real world domains.| Commoncog
One software engineer's story of extracting expertise from the heads of 'a tiger team of senior software engineers'. Useful to anyone who might want to accelerate their own skills.| Commoncog
What do metagames have to do with the acquisition of expertise?| Commoncog
Believability is a criterion for evaluating practical advice, originally articulated by Ray Dalio in his 2017 book Principles. These are some notes from practice.| Commoncog
Why bother learning history, when history isn't likely to repeat itself? We take a look at what Cognitive Flexibility Theory tells us about the best way to learn from other people's experiences.| Commoncog
What Cognitive Flexibility Theory tells us about the acceleration of expertise in ill-structured domains.| Commoncog
Learning from history is often problematic — history is context and path dependent, and it doesn't repeat itself. But what if there is a better way to read history, one that sidesteps these problems?| Commoncog
Results of a four month accelerated expertise experiment in Judo. Or: "I expected to learn about deliberate practice but instead learnt a ton about my mental shortcomings."| Commoncog