Tactics for Tech Leadership Podcast

S2E41 – Improvement Beyond Podcasts – The Art of Deliberate Practice

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by

Andrew Parker
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Show Notes

Andy and Mon-Chaio explore the concept of growth and improvement, focusing on technical leadership. They learn about deliberate practice and discuss its role in enhancing skills for leaders. Scrabble players help them identify practices that lead to skill improvements and contrasting methods that don’t, such as casual reading or working. The discussion wanders to how these findings relate to NBA coaching and engineering leadership. By the end, listeners will understand why deliberate practice, reflection, and handling high-stakes situations are essential for leaders aiming to improve their skills.

References

Transcript

Andy: Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the TTL podcast. Mon Chiao and I are going to talk this time about, what are we talking about, Mon Chiao? Growth and improvement, just in general, just in anything we can think of, how to grow and improve.

Mon-Chaio: That sounds like something we would talk about. We ostensibly are about technical leadership, but how much do we really talk about technical leadership?

Andy: suppose maybe we should try to narrow that down a little bit into more of like, how can you as leaders grow and improve? Is it I just sit down and read a book? And then I know it and I can do it? Is that all it takes is just reading my entire bookshelf?

Mon-Chaio: I mean, I think that that’s at least part of what it takes. And we’re talking about improvement because we’re big believers in improvement, right? Otherwise, why would we be doing this podcast? The whole point of this podcast is to bring out new ideas to help you think differently so that you can improve.

And so in some ways, this podcast is a bookshelf, just in audio form with a bit more rambling.

Andy: The number of times just before an episode where I actually run to my bookshelf and go and grab two or three books and sit down and start flipping through them trying to remember what was in that? What was this one? Everyone listening will get a, a bit of a sense of what’s on my bookshelf.

Mon-Chaio: And I know we do want to focus on how do technical leaders, CTOs, all the way down to line managers, software engineering managers improve, or even tech leads. But I think in order to start there, we need to bring in research that’s not specifically about technical leaders. It’s about, is there any research on how do people improve skills in general? What are things that work? And what are things that don’t?

Andy: that this article that you have about Scrabble?

Mon-Chaio: So there, so there is a lot of research on this. Looking at various different aspects of learning. I was really drawn to a set of research that talks about deliberate practice.

Andy: yes.

Mon-Chaio: And these folks, I believe it was 1989 or 1990, so, gosh, Andy, we’re old. 30 years ago was that?

40 years ago. Over 40 years ago.

Andy: No, no, that’s not over 40 years ago. I was born in the start of the eighties and I’m 44.

Mon-Chaio: Okay. So 30 years ago, I was right the first time, 30 years

Andy: The computers do the math for us. We don’t have to do this ourselves. So that’s why we’re terrible at it.

Mon-Chaio: That’s right. Date time dot now minus. Okay. So that was when I believe their first set of research around deliberate practice was published. And they had a set of things that they thought deliberate practice meant, and we’ll go into that a little bit later. And in searching for disciplines where they felt like that was met, they ended up picking music.

So musicians and they studied what is the difference between musicians that succeed or have high skill versus musicians that just have average skill and is it their teachers and whatnot and then of course they have this hypothesis that it came down to deliberate practice and that hypothesis was met there.

Since then there’s been a lot of studies. and this one that I picked out, this Scrabble one is more, much more recent. I believe it was 2018 or 2019, something like that. So it was much more recent. The study was looking at what accounts for the difference between male Scrabble players having higher Scrabble ratings and being generally more skilled in terms of winning tournaments and winning matches than female Scrabble players. And what they found was it came down to deliberate practice. Now what’s interesting is when we think about practice in these disciplines, we often think, oh well there’s a lot of different ways you can practice, but deliberate practice is something very specific. So I’m going to read the definition of deliberate practice from the original paper on musicians. There, there was one, the fifth one was out a little bit later, but the authors, uh, agree that these five are the set. So deliberate practice is defined as the task must be well defined with a clear goal and fully understood by the participant. The practice task,

Andy: So it’s, it’s, it’s not a, it’s not a sudden, uh, here do this thing. You’ve never thought of this before.

Mon-Chaio: right or go practice this thing that like has many unknowns and you’ll kind of figure it out, do your own research or whatever. Number two, the participants need to be able to perform the task by themselves.

Andy: Okay.

Mon-Chaio: a little bit trickier. , I don’t know that I necessarily agree with that, but that’s their definition.

That’s a clear need in deliberate practice. Number three, the participants need to gain immediate information and actionable feedback on each performance of the practice task that allows them to make appropriate adjustments to improve. So this is short feedback

cycles, right. They need to be able to say, Hey, I practiced this.

This was good or was not good.

Andy: And what’s interesting on that is that in this case they’re talking about violin players, was it? Uh, or musical

Mon-Chaio: Mmm, I believe so. I believe it was

Andy: And so it’s not that they’re getting a, Oh, I liked that. Or I didn’t like that. They’re getting very specific feedback about, Oh, at that point in it where you, uh, where you played a G, I think you should have played the F sharp, but I can’t remember my music.

So something like that, they’re, they’re, they’re being told very specific, actionable things that they should change.

Mon-Chaio: Well, and that gets back to the first part. So, if you understand the task well, my practice here is about transitioning from the G to the A in a way that’s clear and consistent and doesn’t have other notes in between it, then you can do number three, which is, I did it. That task was well understood to me.

Did I do that? No, or

Andy: then I can say, you got most way there but I could hear your finger moving along the string.

Mon-Chaio: right. Although if we take number two, they have to perform the task by themselves, then the coach is not there. So there’s, there, there,

we, we can talk about

Andy: I, I, I wouldn’t take by themselves meaning without anyone else around. I would take by themselves as they can do it independently.

Mon-Chaio: so there’s, there’s. Arguments about that, I think, for some of the authors, they really believe that practice is a solo activity. Now, I think, and that actually made it very difficult, so when they went out searching for disciplines in which they could measure deliberate practice, there were a lot of disciplines that didn’t meet the cut.

Things like sports, where it was very difficult to find solo activity practice, not that they don’t exist. And so, they picked music because it met that

Andy: no, interesting. Okay. Okay.

Mon-Chaio: Now we could, you know, we can say, well, um, can we sort of extend it and does it still make sense even if the authors don’t necessarily agree?

That’s a discussion I think is worth having. Um, so, uh, that was number three. Number four is the participant needs to be able to repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks. Right that

Andy: Yep. Do your scales.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. And then number five the practice task must be designed and performed in accordance with individualized instruction and guidance of a teacher now remember this was the one that was added a few years later after their original paper. So that’s the definition to deliver practice getting back to Scrabble now if you apply that what you’ll notice is It fits really well with the observed findings.

So, as an example, they noticed that playing more games of Scrabble did not correlate with higher Scrabble skill. Now, you might say, well that’s practice, right? If I played one game of Scrabble and I play a thousand games of Scrabble, I should be better in my thousandth game than I am in my first game.

But it turns out it doesn’t. I thought that was super interesting that like in their study they found that there was no correlation between skill and the number of Scrabble games you played. The thing that I found even more interesting is they found there was negative correlation with general vocabulary study.

and

Andy: I’ve heard this one that non native speakers are better at Scrabble than native speakers.

Mon-Chaio: I have heard that one too. I didn’t think about that until you just mentioned it, but I have heard that one too. And the, in the study, the authors talk about things like, I think, I can’t remember whether Scrabble or word games in general, where they found that people’s vocabulary only showed itself in that specific situation.

So you might have a high Scrabble vocabulary, but then you sit down to write a paper and that vocabulary is non existent.

Andy: Oh, interesting.

Mon-Chaio: for you. So what did they find was predictive? Deliberate practice.

Specifically taking a game that you played and replaying it with either a coach helping you analyze each move or a computer program helping you analyze each move. And this fits well with other things like chess players. Apparently that’s also a great

Andy: I was gonna say, you, you used to teach or you still teach chess. I imagine that’s a, a study technique for chess, is that you, you could take a game that the player went through and then you just go through it again and you look at this choice, you had these other choices to make these, this would’ve been a better move because of these other things that could later.

That kind of thing. Mm-Hmm.

Mon-Chaio: Absolutely. And then sort of foreshadowing, you would then as a individualized instruction, that’s number five on deliver practice, you would say the student is weak in these types of things. Now I can have what would you call them? Like practice problems? that aren’t from real games, or are from real games, but aren’t from the student games where they could repeat this over and over again.

Here’s another situation where you’re supposed to notice that there’s an overloaded piece, and so you’re supposed to, you know, stress that over and over and over again, right? And so what the paper found was they found that all of the difference Essentially between men Scrabble players and women Scrabble players skill was due to men doing more deliberate practice Um, they end up getting into well, why is that?

That’s why I picked the Scrabble paper is because I think there are things that naively we would think would lead to better Scrabble skill, but doesn’t and the only thing that they found did was this concept of deliberate practice.

Andy: Interesting. And that actually to connect this back to management, leadership, that kind of thing, that fits with a paper that I found. Which was looking at, whether or not particular kinds of experience in a discipline correlated to better, like, leadership ability. In this case, they were, they were looking at NBA coaches, and what they wanted to do.

It, it was a fairly simplistic study, so you can take this one with a little bit of a grain of salt, but it has been maybe worryingly, the foundation of several other things, , that has gone on to it. It, it creates, I think, a useful thing to think about and it’s, I think a, what a lot of us have experienced as well.

So it does, it does fit that experiential check a little bit, which you have to be careful with. And what they found was they looked at the experience of NBA coaches and their experience either as had they been a player, how much experience did they have as a player? Had they been a coach in non NBA basketball?

Had they been a coach in NBA basketball? Had they been a coach for NBA basketball all the way through championships, through tournaments? To the high stakes, high stress stuff. And what they found was going into it, you might think, well, just any coaching experience if you just play the game, you’ll get better.

What they found was no, actually there is no correlation between non NBA coaching experience and their NBA performance. But if they had NBA coaching experience. That actually did help them so so that that origin of your experience and the kind of experience you get. Now there’s other things that they get into which we’ll probably get to a little bit later But it kind of fits with that idea around The deliberate practice of Scrabble and just playing the game won’t get you there You have to deliberately practice the game that you’re going to be playing

Mon-Chaio: hmm. I like it and I think that fits well with some of the later research that we may talk about around what are the attributes that make a good engineering leader? That people have tried to study. And foreshadowing, one of them is technical ability, and that has to do with Do you know the domain in which you’re working?

Andy: and and that connects for these NBA coaches That one of the things that correlated to them having better outcomes as NBA coaches was, were they players?

Mon-Chaio: Hmm,

Andy: Did they play the game? If they played the game, they know what their, in this case, their subordinates are going through. They know what they’re doing.

They know how it’s happening. The kind of like extension we can take from that as possibly. If you’re trying to manage a technical, a software engineering organization, and you’ve never done software development, probably not going to do very well. Which is the thing that we’ve talked about in the past, that like, do lead, do leaders have to be technical?

And I believe the conclusion we came to is, yeah, you’re going to need to be at least somewhat technical to understand what’s going on.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, maybe we’ll have to augment our thinking there because I believe what we concluded there was you have to have a technical mindset, but you don’t necessarily have to have done software development. It was the technical thinking.

Andy: I don’t remember what we came to a conclusion we got to.

Mon-Chaio: and I think that might be true, but it may be that in addition, if you have done it in the past, you’re more likely to be a better leader of software engineers. So that’s that’s an interesting thing to think about. The next question in my mind then was okay, so we think about this concept of deliberate practice being

Andy: Mm hmm.

Mon-Chaio: right?

So can we take that now to engineering leadership and talk about common things that we see people try to do to improve themselves and whether or not it meets the definition of deliberate practice.

Andy: All right. What are things that I see that people try to do to improve themselves?

I see them reading. That’s not deliberate practice.

Mon-Chaio: No, I don’t believe so. Right. I think we can both agree that that like, there’s no specific task. It’s not repeating. You’re not repeating the same paragraph over. Maybe if you read the same book over and over and over again, maybe

Andy: But you’re the, the, the key to me is that you’re not performing anything. You’re, you’re, you’re taking it in, but you’re not, you’re not doing anything with it. And I think that’s a key part of deliberate practice is that you’re doing something with what’s in your head.

Mon-Chaio: Got it. Where you have to make a new

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: Right. Okay. I like that. Okay. Reading. Yep.

Andy: are other things that I see people doing? Discussion groups. Where you have kind of like mentoring circles things where you just, you have discussions about things.

Mon-Chaio: hmm.

Andy: Is that deliberate practice?

Mon-Chaio: Most often it’s not. It can be if then you start to do some prep, some deliberate practice in your discussion group. So, some discussion groups, very, very few, but I have seen some, will say, okay, well, um, You know, help me understand that situation a little bit. I’ll play this role, you play that role, and help me understand what went on.

I think that’s getting a lot closer to deliberate practice.

Andy: what I was thinking. If, if you get into that role play type setup, then I think you can get to deliberate practice.

Mon-Chaio: right, but most of them, I think, is people complaining and then other people telling them maybe how to solve their problem or maybe complaining too. So, oh, I have an engineer and all they want to do is work on technical debt. And someone will be like, oh, you know, I had an engineer like that and what worked for me was I wrote in their goals, yearly goals, that they needed to be able to deliver value.

And here’s the KPIs I gave them. They said, oh, well, we don’t have KPIs like that. And that back and forth, I don’t think is

Andy: No, no. Well, and we actually have to ask ourselves from the definition that we had, do we want to loosen it a little? Because by the definition, I think a role play is not a deliberate practice.

Mon-Chaio: I agree. And this is where I was saying that, yeah, I think. In my mind, I feel like I could loosen it a little bit and still meet most of the criteria for the deliberate practice. Did we, did we want to go back in for each item or do we want

Andy: To me, I think you only have to loosen one thing and that that’s, the participant needs to be able to perform the task by themselves. I think it’s that they need to be able to perform their actions by themselves. So it’s, you kind of want the person to be taking their part, their steps in whatever dance it is you’re doing, without the coach coming up and saying, now you put your foot here, and now you put your foot there.

Mon-Chaio: Right. Or bracing them and saying, okay, you know, I’m going to hold you to make sure you don’t fall. Now do this. And I think that there’s, there’s a tricky balance here in terms of role play. I think in my mind where when they are responding, they have their own creative thinking in order to respond themselves, I think is deliberate practice.

But I think there are types of collaborative, what you might call practice, where your action depends on the output of someone else’s action. They throw a ball to you and you have to catch it or whatever. How they throw the ball. Impacts how you can practice the skill and so then I think it’s less deliberate practice, but yeah

Andy: But I think you can still get there if, if you work out a, uh, a a thing with the other person or the group that you’re working with to say this is the specific activity we are practicing right now. And so you throw the ball to me underhand. No overhand throws. We’re just doing underhand.

Mon-Chaio: That’s right. Okay. Yeah, I agree. Okay, so reading, almost definitely not deliberate practice. Discussion groups? Maybe, but most likely not based on the way most discussion groups work. What else is there? Listening to podcasts?

Andy: that’s the same as reading. I think,

Mon-Chaio: Sam is reading, right? Andy, how about this one? Just working.

Andy: uh,

Mon-Chaio: You’ll have a chance to practice, Andy, because the situation will come up in work.

Andy: I think the thing about work is that, and I think we’ll, this might segue us to another bit of this. The thing about work is you can’t, you can’t like. produce and practice at the same time. And, and so like, I think for the deliberate practice stuff, we have no control over that situation, really. It’s just going to come up.

So I can’t practice things before it actually happens. I don’t have any opportunity to, in most cases, I don’t have any opportunity to do it again,

Mon-Chaio: hmm.

Andy: have had that high stakes conversation with, uh, with a customer and then finish it off, think about it, get someone coaching me, and then say, yeah, this is how it would have gone better if we’d done it this way.

Okay, let’s call them back up and try that again. It’s not the same situation again.

Mon-Chaio: I agree. And I think about this, there’s a corollary in sports where they say, A lot of the skill learning is done what they call during the off season, and almost no teaching is done during the season because it just confuses players. During the season you’re in competition. Your goal is to win. That means to execute the things you do best as many times as you can. Not to execute the thing that might lead you to do something better six months down the road as many times as you can so that in six months you’re better, right? Because you’re in competition. And I think it’s that way in work too. You can think about, let’s step down from leadership for a sec, to think about an individual software engineer who’s saying, Ooh, I read this blog post on an interesting way to do memory management in clusters.

Andy: Yeah, just implement that right into our cluster management software.

Mon-Chaio: Right. Um, I mean, I read it. Uh, it seems great. Now, uh, this customer is saying that memory is an issue. This appears to be more efficient. So I’m just going to implement. I’ve never done it before. No one in my team’s done it before. I’m just going to do it. That’s high risk, right?

That’s not, that’s not what you want. You want to do tried and true solutions so that people pay you money, right? You’re not a research lab.

Andy: And and you want to take those things and you want to put them into an environment of some sort of practice, we could call it deliberate practice, where you actually learn about, do you understand it? Do you understand how it can fail? Do you understand if it does start happening that way, uh, how you’d recover? This exact reason, to take it to a, a, Slightly less implementation, but, much more day to day type thing is why a team that I worked with, uh, used MySQL database. Could have switched to Postgres, could have switched to a sort of a whole bunch of other database systems that would have possibly re, uh, handled what they were trying to do better. But the problem was. No one knew, no one had like the hands on experience, the practice, the experience of running any of these other database systems. And so it would have been a very poor judgment on that company’s part for the engineers and the infrastructure group to just suddenly throw that new database system into production and say, Hey, there we go.

We had 10 years of experience of how to back up MySQL, how to tune it for the workload it had to run, all these other things. If you didn’t practice the other one, you, you wouldn’t have had a very good performance.

Mon-Chaio: I don’t think so, Andy. I think you’re wrong. I think all you need to do is read the right blog posts cause they tell you exactly what to type. So just type That in. Or, or even better is you ask chat GPT because it has read all the blog posts. So it knows which ones are bad and which ones are good. So you just tell chat GPT, Hey, look at my production topology and convert me to

Andy: Yeah. Here’s my MySQL config, uh, uh, write, write me out a Postgres config that’s equivalent.

Mon-Chaio: Right, that’s all you need. All right, so obviously just doing day to day work is also not deliberate practice. Um, anything else we see? I guess mentorship that’s close to discussion groups

most of the

Andy: I think that’s,

Mon-Chaio: Most of the time it doesn’t have to be, but, okay.

leadership seminars?

Andy: that sounds like a discussion group again, or, or it could be a podcast type thing where you get talked to. If, if the leadership seminar includes role play, maybe we’re back to that. Like if the role play is set up properly, Oh, what about all of those agile games? You know, where, where, where you get the, you get the group together and you’re like, here, let’s learn how Kanban works.

And you’re going to, you’re, you’re all part of a factory and you’re building this thing and you’re moving the stuff through. Is that deliberate practice?

Mon-Chaio: Interesting. I don’t know. I think it could be. My, my gut feeling is that it’s not. But if I think about it, I think it could be you are taking a situation, these games, You’re practicing them over and over again in order to try to learn repeatable skills. What did I fail with last

Andy: Mm hmm.

Mon-Chaio: What went well? But you also don’t get that immediate feedback about every step.

You might retrospect after the game, each iteration of the game is over and say, What went well? What didn’t? And that might help, and you’re also not really able to do your action alone most of the time. A lot of that’s very collaborative, people talking and saying, No, I think, you know, we should, I think we should think about this queue over here, which is getting overloaded, or things like that.

Andy: I, to me, a lot of it comes down to what is the skill that you’re practicing?

Mon-Chaio: Mm

Andy: a lot of those things, I don’t think that there’s really a skill that you’re practicing. There’s an experience that you’re trying to gain. You’re trying to gain this experience of like, oh, here’s where a bottleneck is in the system.

That’s what, that’s what you see, but you’re not really gaining the skill. And I would say partly because you’re not making little paper airplanes at work. So you’re practicing something that isn’t even what you do.

Mon-Chaio: I think it depends. I think if you think the skill is to be able to spot bottlenecks, that is a skill that you can practice through those things. And I think that’s a transferable skill

Andy: Maybe.

Mon-Chaio: to say, Oh, well, in this paper copy of this game, I can look at my queue sizes and spot bottlenecks, or, I can see a production line and see things slowing down and see that that might be a bottleneck there.

I think that might be a transferable skill.

Andy: Okay. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. I might go along with you on that one.

Mon-Chaio: But I, but I think that it’s, it’s challenging, right? And I think unless, I think in order to make a deliberate practice, somebody has to sit down and say, per number one, the task is well defined with a clear goal and fully understood. You have to decide what is it that you’re deliberately practicing. And I think for most people, it’s very vague.

It’s just, oh, learn, be better at Kanban, which, like, I don’t know, it is a skill, but it’s so broad that I don’t think it means much.

Andy: more of a discipline than a skill. It’s like, there’s all this stuff. It’s like, you’re not practicing then. You’re, you’re, you’re kind of getting an exposure.

Mon-Chaio: Right. Now, so, Andy, are we saying that mentorship, discussion groups, reading books, doing work, I mean, you have to do work, but doing work, those are not valuable? Just stop doing those. Those don’t lead to better

Andy: Just don’t do work.

No, I, I, I don’t think so, but I think, I think what we’re doing is we’re saying those aren’t deliberate practice, but deliberate practice isn’t the end all, be all of how you improve. Taking this through to other papers, another paper I found, they tried to come up with, this wasn’t, this wasn’t like an empirical study or anything.

This one though was coming up with. Uh, what did they think leadership development needed? And they, they, they proposed that you need deliberate practice. So of specific skills, you would need deliberate practice of those skills. You need reflective learning and that, that’s where that more mentorship and those discussion groups come in.

When they’re done well, they become events to reflect on what has happened so that you can integrate and you can, you can. coalesce all of those random things going on and start turning them into something that you can work with that maybe identify a skill that you need to deliberately practice. And then the third thing that they identified, and this was then connected to that NBA coach study, they called it the creation of experience density, which is a weird term.

I thought when I first read it, I was like, what? Basically what they mean is. It is in high stakes, high pressure scenarios, stick with people the most. And so if, if you have sessions, if you have like work that is always just mellow, you’re not really going to have many high density experiences. And, those things then, they don’t have as much of an impact on your behavior.

Mon-Chaio: interesting,

Andy: their claim is that you need to have these high density experiences , and then you need to reflect on them, and those are the things that will really drive your behaviors. So this was, for the NBA coaches, this was them being in the playoffs.

Mon-Chaio: I

Andy: So the playoff, like getting to the playoffs, that’s where they’re, that seemed to have a strong correlation to their later performance.

Mon-Chaio: interesting,

Andy: And the, the hypothesis or the theory sitting behind this is, is that whole thing of like that experience really solidifies a particular mode of operating in them. And as I was reading this, I was like, that’s a double edged sword because you need to be conscious of what is the lesson you’re taking away from that high stakes, high pressure, high stress experience. And I think that’s where the reflective learning is critical because if, if, if you go into that like high stress experience and then you come out with the wrong lesson that you took away from it. If you don’t have someone with experience to help you frame what to see in that, then you could end up solidifying something where you’re like, oh, the only way to get ahead is yell at people where they’re like, no, no, no.

Yes, you yelled, but that’s not what caused this to work.

Mon-Chaio: yeah, I, I’m gonna have to reflect on this a little bit. I can see where they’re coming from. I think oftentimes in high stress situations, the wheat is separated from the chaff, right? And so, especially in a competitive situation like a sports game, you might think, oh, well, I want to do some player development here, and here’s some trust buildings, we’re going to run some plays to allow people to trust each other or whatnot, but when you get to the playoffs, it’s win at all costs or you’re out.

And so a lot of that falls away and you start to figure out. Oh, well, What are the things I absolutely need to do and do more of in order to move on? I think that’s valid and I think accumulating a lot of those experiences hardens you and gets you used to executing those experiences But i’m not sure how well that necessarily translates into a technical organization you might imagine the high stakes situation being a customer is breathing down your neck right now to ship software that you can’t possibly ship at that time That’s a high stress situation. What’s ways that people have learned to cope with that? Things like cut corners on quality, uh, things like, um, oh, well, we’ll promise them something, but then we won’t deliver exactly that thing, but they won’t know because they don’t see underneath it. We’ll fix it later. Uh, we’ll accumulate some technical debt. Are those the right lessons to your point to learn? And are those then the right lessons going back to some of our earlier episodes to execute in peacetime situations?

Andy: so I’ll actually take one of those as, as an example and say that it’s not always the, the immediately obvious thing that you learn, or it’s not the thing that happened in that stressful. situation that you should learn from. Sometimes it’s what got you to that stressful situation is what you learn. It’s, it’s like, Oh, we are here because we did these other

Mon-Chaio: Ah, okay.

Andy: , But, but because you’re in that stressful situation, you will remember it more. So, for instance, I, I recall a situation that we got into at a company I worked at where we were not a hundred percent honest with our customer that we were delivering to. And we got into a mindset of our cycle time is faster than theirs. We can release to them faster than they can test our software. it’s okay for us to release things to them and don’t, and not tell them things that we know aren’t working because we’re going to do another release before they even get to testing it, that will fix the thing.

And then it will make it look like we, we, we released the stuff at the time that they thought we did. That came back to bite us. They got very upset with us. And the, the lesson I learned from that was actually one of like transparency. Just being honest about it, being clear, and also having that clarity so that we can have discussions about the trade offs around these things.

So it wasn’t that I, I took the lesson of, you should never release something that’s not working, or that technical debt is bad, or things like that. The lesson that I got out of it was you, you should make sure you have these honest conversations with people to avoid that situation.

Mon-Chaio: That’s a, that’s a real good, yeah, that’s a really good real life example. I like that one. All right, so we have what? We have deliver practice, we have these high density situations, And then we have the third thing which is reflection, right? Reflective thinking. And I think I agree with that paper. I think all three are necessary.

I think they kind of feed into each other. To me, the high density situations and the reflection feeds into what you deliberately

practice. Because if you don’t have the other two, You’re just practicing nothing or things that aren’t useful. Maybe you have a coach that helps you through them, but I don’t think it connects with you as strongly.

But also, if you have those other two, but you don’t have deliberate practice, it’s like the old adage, right? When you learn something, if you don’t use it, 90 percent of it is gone, something, in like a week. Right? This is the why you go to conferences, you come back, and three weeks later, you’re no better than you were before you went.

Andy: And, and that even gets to, in this case, how can you practice these things? Like, how do I practice being transparent with a customer?

Mon-Chaio: Mm

Andy: How do I, how do I do that deliberately? And there I have a specific tactic, a specific structure that people can use. I, we might’ve talked about it before. It’s the two column case study.

And it’s actually from the, the, the, um, Agile Conversations book, their structure. Which is that you, because all of this stuff in the end for leadership, at some point, it’s coming down to some conversation you had. The first thing you do for your deliberate practice is you think about this conversation.

So in this case, it might’ve been a conversation that we were having with this customer. And then you write down what was your goal in that conversation. You write, you write down the conversation as you remember it. It doesn’t have to be the whole thing. It can be just a section of it. You write down what your thoughts and feelings were. And now you have something that you can practice with. And the practice is, how do you have a different conversation? And there’s, there’s different tacks on this. So you can say, how do I make sure that I’m curious? And so you look for ways in this conversation to be more curious, or how can I, in this conversation, be more honest about what it is that’s happening.

Mon-Chaio: Mm

Andy: And, and what you do is then you actually practice it. You write down a different conversation. And then you role play it with someone, and then you reverse that role play, and you, you act as the other side where someone acts as you, so that you can experience the other side of it. And then you revise again, and you just keep doing that until you’re happy with where you get to, or you run out of time, or patience.

But that’s, that’s the deliberate practice of a conversation.

Mon-Chaio: Yes, I really like that. You need to find a partner. And hopefully not just a partner but a coach that can help you out with I think would be ideal, because communication is such an important part of being a leader.

Andy: I think that’s a great place to end this. And for anyone listening. These are things that we’ve coached people on, we’ve helped them practice on, we’ve got all sorts of ways of deliberately practicing various parts , of these competencies that we think leaders need to have, and these researchers think leaders need to have.

So if you’re interested in any of that, or if you just have a question for us, if you have some topic that you want Mon Chaio and I to go delve into, to use the AI term, I’ve just heard that delve is the word used by the chatbots all the time now. Just send us an email at hosts at the TTL podcast. com or you can find us on social media on LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to find us.

I’m not so much on X or or Mastodon or anything anymore. So Email. We’ll, we’ll just be old school. Email us if you want to get in touch.

Mon-Chaio: Right. Cause remember we were both born in the eighties, which was 40 years ago.

Andy: And if you have an organization that could use us to help you improve in any other way, please get in touch for that as well. We’re here to help. Until next time, be kind and stay curious.

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