We’ve all heard the adage that practice makes perfect. And most are familiar with studies, anecdotes, or popular press articles that support this axiom.
For example, you may have heard about Malcom Gladwell’s “10,000-Hour Rule.”
This rule, featured in his New York Times’ bestselling book, “Outliers: The Story of Success,” is inspired by K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues’ research on the influence of deliberate practice. The rule maintains that successful skill acquisition occurs with around 10,000 hours of practice.
However, recent research published in Psychological Science, casts doubt on the generality of this rule. Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues conducted a meta-analysis combining 88 studies of the effects of practice across educational, professional, athletic and game domains. In each of the 88 studies, individuals were using practice to acquire new skills — time spent practicing was then related to eventual performance of those skills. Not surprisingly, results of the meta-analysis revealed that practice is indeed important for acquiring skills. However, the big surprise came from the size of that effect. The influence of practice on skill acquisition was relatively small, though significant – practice accounted for only 12 percent of the variance in performance, indicating that a number of other factors impact whether or not a practiced skill is acquired.
Moreover, that impact varied — the number of hours practiced was most strongly tied to acquisition of game related skills, followed by sports, education, and at the bottom end, the relationship between professional skill acquisition and practice was almost zero.
Context also played a role — for situations in which the environment was highly unpredictable (e.g., responding to an aviation emergency), practice was less strongly linked to performance. The study suggested other factors that could influence skill acquisition: age (the early you start, the better), intelligence, personality, and working memory.
Given these recent findings, you may be asking, if abandoning training and development processes that encourage practice is a good idea. The answer is, no.
The results do however, make clear that practice plays a smaller role than conventional wisdom originally held. Thus, it is important to be aware of the limitations of practice when designing and delivery training and development initiatives.
Practice of important skills should be one of many strategies used to develop learners. Recent Training Industry research, “Using Virtual Environments for Leadership Development,” points to other useful strategies including providing feedback, pre-training assignments, and post-training coaching.
