#268: The 10,000 hour rule revisited
Find out who Malcolm Gladwell's thinks is a better example! Tiger Woods or Roger Federer
In a recent interview on Megyn Kelly's podcast, Malcolm Gladwell clarified the 10,000-hour rule. The 10,000 Rule is detailed in Mr. Gladwell's book Outliers and in short, it states that it takes 10,000 hours of preparation to become an expert. Readers of this theory have understood that the preparation should be centered on one activity. Think Tiger Woods and golf, right? Tiger only played golf from the time he was old enough to swing a club.
Now, look at Roger Federer, the recently retired tennis pro. He would be the equivalent of Tiger Woods in his sport. However, he didn't take up tennis full time until he was 15 or 16. He spent his childhood in every sport. Some say his footwork on the tennis court could be attributed to his playing soccer when he was young.
You can listen to the podcast version by clicking HERE
The idea Mr. Gladwell stresses is preparation not focus
Mr. Gladwell's assertion and differentiation of preparation is an excellent lesson for leadership and staff development. What skills can your team pick up by rotating through your departments? For example, would a 6-month assignment in the field benefit your accounting team instead of focusing only on financial forms?
As our leadership skills improve and we move up in our respective organizations, at some point, we need to realize we can't be experts at everything. However, we also need to recognize that we will be responsible for decisions we make in areas we have no expertise. For example, you may be an expert in sales & marketing, so how do you decide to finance a new $2 Million ERP System? We need financial, and IT skills for this.
You need exposure so you can pick up terminology, examples, and ideas from various areas. If you put yourself in different situations over time, you will pick up baseline knowledge. You will see what worked and what didn't. In the future, you can draw on these experiences to solve new challenges. Tying an incident unrelated to your current situation and making a decision requires cognitive skills.
Cognitive skills & analogous decision making
Cognitive skills are your brain's core skills to think, read, learn, remember, reason, and pay attention. Working together, they take incoming information and move it into the bank of knowledge you use every day at school, at work, and in life. Each of your cognitive skills plays an essential part in processing new information.
We grow in each of these core skills with our experiences. Based on these experiences, good leaders can then use analogous thinking to solve problems that, on the surface, have nothing in common.
Analogous thinking is beneficial for businesses for multiple reasons. First, it provides leaders with a tool for solving unfamiliar business problems when other tools will not suffice. Instead of investing significant resources to validate if a product works, drawing an analogy can help unearth the right insights to answer critical questions.
Another benefit of analogous thinking for business strategy is that it efficiently bundles decisions. Analogies provide the set of decisions that led to such success. These bundles will help the leader develop an entire playbook for replication.
Finally, analogies are easier to communicate to the team. Instead of explaining an elaborate solution and a potential outcome, an analogy can help a leader communicate what they are trying to achieve by leveraging the stories from another organization.
Why does this matter?
As you grow, don't be as concerned about learning everything you can about one industry. If you have a Ph.D., I apologize in advance. Many people refer to a Ph.D. degree as 'piled high deeper'. Your abilities to use this type of thinking are limited, as your expertise is so focused.
Furthermore, as you hire people into your organization, diversify! Find people in unrelated businesses or industries and put them on the team. Ask them how they can use their previous experiences and apply them to your real-world problems. How many have looked at job descriptions that say you must have 7 to 10 years of experience to apply? This is where we start pigeonholing our team, building a group think environment.
So who did Mr. Gladwell say was a better athlete?
I'll let you watch that yourself in the Megyn Kelly Interview. But, in the meantime, if you want better, well-rounded decision makers in your organization, try looking outside of your industry. It's a hard habit to break, but it will lead to better decision-making in the future!