Geoff Colvin: Talent is Overrated

We interview Geoff Colvin, Fortune's senior editor-at-large, about the myth of being born with talent and how Deliberate Practice separates progress from time wasted on mediocrity.

00:35 Insights & Takeaways
12:00 Interview

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Twitter: @geoffcolvin
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Transcript

Marcus Kirsch: 0:16

Welcome to the wicked podcast where we read business books you don't have time for. I'm Marcus Kirsch.

Troy Norcross: 0:22

And I'm Troy Norcross,

Marcus Kirsch: 0:24

and we are your co hosts for the wicked podcast,

Troy Norcross: 0:27

we take from the 1000s of business books out there and test the author's ideas by comparing them to real world challenges. With over 40 years or projects between us, we've got quite a bit to compare against. We give you the condensed takeaways followed by an interview with the author's we

Marcus Kirsch: 0:43

know you want actions, not theories, and his actions that we want to help shape, because that's what the wicked podcast is all about helping you to become a wicked company.

Troy Norcross: 0:54

Well, at least it's a really nice sunny day today, Marcus, um, who are we talking to today?

Marcus Kirsch: 1:00

So today, we talked to Jeff Colvin, who wrote a book called talent is overrated. And the core premise is that he's talking about deliberate practice, which is different to learning and the 10,000 hours rule, how we learn better and more efficiently and not just put hours and

Troy Norcross: 1:21

overtime. I've heard this whole 10,000 hours to become an expert of things kind of bandied around as to anecdotes here and there. I really had no idea that there was 40 years kind of, of research that they put together to make all of this true. And then some of the great examples in the book kind of brought the whole thing to life. So I thought it was, it was interesting, because as you say, it's not just 10,000 hours of doing the same thing over and over again, it's the concept of deliberate practice.

Marcus Kirsch: 1:50

Exactly. So he starts with debunking the myth of people are born talented with particular talents, the research just doesn't support that myth. Which one big piece? And the other one is about? Yeah, everyone pretty much has the same ability to get amazing a world class in something. The question is, are they willing to do it? are they learning in the right way? Are they set up to that? The general research shows that we're actually all much closer to each other in terms of ability of what we can do in terms of potential, which is an amazing insight, because it means that all of us have way more potential than we ever thought we do.

Troy Norcross: 2:35

And we do and as individuals, I think that's interesting. What I'm hoping that we get out of our interview today is a look at an inside look rather at how do these kind of approaches How does this deliberate practice apply in an enterprise environment? How do we apply this approach to organisations? How can we actually kind of bring it, bring it home and not just talk about a single individual who's a concert pianist, or an excellent ice skater? But how do you actually kind of bring it back to an organisational level?

Marcus Kirsch: 3:08

Exactly. Yeah, it's just not sustainable that every company in the world, every organisation will have world class people in them, and most can't afford them or it's not, it's just not sustainable. So the question is, how much can you actually create a culture or a context within your own organisation, that whoever you have can learn as much and improve as much as they have to potentially do as an individual or as a group, because we know that group dynamics around that are complex, the part you love is the fact that a lot of it has to do with the ability to fail and fail fast or having the context that you are allowed to fail.

Troy Norcross: 3:54

Exactly. Fail is fine, as long as you're learning and fail is fine. As long as the leadership in the organisation doesn't look at it as as something catastrophic. But that failure is just part of the innovation process. It's part of the learning process.

Marcus Kirsch: 4:09

Exactly. So I think the more you are in a culture, and I liked the references, and tying back to skateboarding where 1998 99% of practice is failure is quite relevant because skateboarding has a culture of failure more than success or success is even more amazing, because everybody knows that you have to try things 1000 times till you get it right. And so the culture in that particular sport is in a way that that is actually a value and it is celebrated rather than being pushed away as that's not a value. That's a negative aspect.

Troy Norcross: 4:52

So Marcus, that was a really great interview really loved spending time with Jeff, what did you take away is the big three ideas

Marcus Kirsch: 5:00

As the big three ideas, I would take first and foremost, feedback, feedback matters. Feedback can appear in different forms, either as a personal reflection of you've just done something, you pushed yourself to something that you weren't familiar with and never tried or goes beyond your comfort zone. And then you actually have time to reflect on it. That's when you actually start learning and progressing and understanding what you just did. And therefore, you can move on to the next big thing.

Troy Norcross: 5:29

But he used a very expressive, a very Express phrasing, frequent, rigorous, honest feedback. And I thought that was really good. The only thing that was missing out of that is how can I turn that into an acronym?

Marcus Kirsch: 5:45

Yeah, I guess, feedback doesn't only exist in an individual, it also exists in a team, so you can reflect by yourself, and you can reflect in a team, you know, without rank mattering. Where you have plenty of examples from, from designer backgrounds, having designed credit, everyone talks about idea by opening or in military where you have a after action review, where everyone beyond rank can just say what they think worked and didn't. And that's a great way to feedback, this should also happen beyond a team. So you can get at least three levels of feedback into an organisation as a pro process. And I think it would be highly, highly valuable to do so. So that's my major takeaway, really the feedback aspect, because I can see that that is one of the biggest characteristics to learning and progressing. Because if you never, if you never look at what you did wrong, you're going to repeat that.

Troy Norcross: 6:43

And a point on the feedback is, we need an external source of that feedback that we trust.

Marcus Kirsch: 6:52

I'm not 100% sure about that. I think, you know, because internal feedback works. And maybe I'm a bit too introvert for that I'm bit too much of an over thinker for that. But for me, it worked quite well to at least step back and spend the extra time on just trying to figure out what I just did. And I think it put me in a lot of situations into Hang on a second, I just actually had thought about it. And I therefore started considering different things that you wouldn't normally do, because he would just move on to the next thing. So

Troy Norcross: 7:20

I think that self observation, feedback is sufficient

Marcus Kirsch: 7:24

apps. To some extent, yes. I mean, not beyond the team as an individual, for sure. Not that you then turn your internal reflection into, I just found something definite, the team has been has to do that. No, you have to get that feedback from the team and the team reflects themselves as individuals and then as a team. It needs to be collaborative. Let's say no one a team ever does it, you can still improve yourself on an individual level. So that's nearly three in one briefings, leave it as three and one. That is a big chunky value right then in there.

Troy Norcross: 8:01

Great stuff.

Marcus Kirsch: 8:02

How about you, Troy? What did you make of it?

Troy Norcross: 8:05

I know it was a bit awkward. But I was really glad I got to put out my hypothesis that we need to reframe as an organisation, this kind of drudgery and grunt work in such a way that it can be placed and and structured as deliberate practice that lays the foundation for long term greatness. And I think it can be really, really useful to organisations as, as he was saying that have millennials and have Gen Z's, or, as we say, in the UK, Gen Zed, that this is the way for them to kind of reframe that. The other part of that is to reframe the leadership mindset that says, You can't just throw them in the bottom of the mailroom and expect them to do everything, you've got to provide them constant feedback in such a way that they can indeed grow and learn. So I thought that was probably one of my, one of my big takeaways from from all of this. For me, I think the second thing was, I had I had heard for a very long time that 10,000 hours of practice was how you're supposed to get to be an expert. But I'd really missed the nuance of deliberate practice. And the the nuance of not just feedback. But every time you do something, it has to be slightly beyond your ability to do not so far that you have no chance of doing it and not so little that it's it's easy, but just slightly beyond your existing capabilities. And that, you know, that's a real careful nuance of knowing exactly how far and how much to push yourself on each individual iteration. And the third thing is, you know, the these are really interesting books, but what I'm finding is even in my own daily life and COVID life, I'm finding ways to apply them. So finding it interesting, that whole discussion about how do you inspire people who have time on their hands to do learning to do learning at home in a way that at the end of the time, they didn't just put in a bunch of hours and get nothing. How can you ocean maximise the impact and maximise the results of the time that they're putting in? So I like to I like to COVID insights very much as well, those, those are my big three.

Marcus Kirsch: 10:15

So yeah, you didn't really call it failure, or you didn't really point out failure aspect in your three insights. Why is that?

Troy Norcross: 10:25

So? overarching theme for me, as you well know, is I'm always looking at how do we reframe failure in a way that businesses can embrace the positives of not achieving a goal. And I think that we did talk about it very briefly during the interview. But it wasn't one of my big three takeaways, because I think I've already got a grasp of that's something we've got to do. My big three takeaways from today were beyond that. What were they specific around with regard to talent is overrated the book, and and the time we spent with Jeff

Marcus Kirsch: 11:02

fana, makes sense now that you made really good points. And I know it's a bit of you're stuck and feared there. To us, they're stuck in

Troy Norcross: 11:10

bed. And they tell me what does that mean?

Marcus Kirsch: 11:13

It's a German word for it's the kind of thing you like, talking about and focusing on. hobby, in terms like, the thing you always pick up on is, if trade talks about anything about under in that area, it will be about that. Which is good, because I think it needs a lot of more explanation. I think, you know, the idea that culture and context needs to exist for this to happen. Otherwise, about 10 things will not happen. And you're going to lose tonnes of value as a company, if you don't enable the culture of being allowed to fail. It's so essential, and it's in all the points you're making. It's an underlying piece to it. You know, there's something around Jeff's book where if you don't allow failure, failure is not a thing, then there is no learning.

Troy Norcross: 12:02

But that's great. Always happy to have that.

Marcus Kirsch: 12:05

Super. So let's go to the interview. I take it Yeah. All right. Hello, Jeff. And thank you for making time for us and discuss your book, and probably a few other things. So welcome, Jeff.

Geoff Colvin: 12:23

Thank you, Marcus, delighted to be with you.

Marcus Kirsch: 12:26

Let's jump into some of the questions we found around your your book. And I think what's probably worth doing is to elaborate a little bit on the centrepiece that is in the story, which is about deliberate practice. It's a big part of the book. Can you elaborate a little bit please? What deliberate practice is and how it is sort of different and similar to how we understand practice, and learning in general?

Geoff Colvin: 12:55

Yeah, that as you say, that is the central concept to this whole thing. And it's important to, to set the scene for this, because what I'm going to talk about is the result of research that's been done over the past 40 or 50 years, into the question of why some people are so extremely good at whatever it is they do, whereas most people are just not so good at those same things. And how do we, you know, how do we explain this. And until this research of the past 40 or 45 years is concerned, there was a general assumption that those few people who are so incredibly good, were born that way, basically, that they were born with a rare one in a million natural gift. That certainly if you ask people, you know, why is so and so incredibly great at whatever it is they do, whether it's sports, or music, or anything else, they'll mostly tell you that. And even in the academic literature and the scholarly literature on those, that was the sort of default explanation for why some people were so good that they were just born that way, hard to explain what it was, but they came into this world with a gift for doing that one particular thing extremely well. The trouble with that explanation was that it conflicted with our own observation of real life, which is, yeah, even though we all kind of thought it was a natural gift. We also have all noticed that the people who are extremely good, seem to work extremely hard at getting really good. How could both of those things be true? And so the Researchers started looking into that question. And what they eventually said was, you know, a big problem here is that practice is not very clearly or specifically defined it, we all think we know what it means. But maybe we don't all know what it means. Or maybe we don't all agree on what it means. So that's, that's the setup for the question you've just asked. Most of us think of practice as something we do when we practice the piano or hitting golf balls or something like that, which is sitting down and doing something, doing exercises of one kind or another of over and over. It's what I do when I practice hitting golf balls, you know, or what I did before I looked into all the research. You know, we think that when you go to the range, and you get a bucket of balls, and you just start hitting them, and maybe you have some routine for it, you start with the long irons and you with the short irons, and then you move up to the long irons, and finally hit the the driver and so forth. But if you're like, if you're like me, or like most people, when you finish that session, you're not really any better than you were when you started, you may feel virtuous, you know, like you did some practising, but you didn't accomplish much. And so the researchers did a lot of work. And finally, a team of the most specific team of the researchers, which we can get to identified what they called deliberate practice. Now, people hear that term, and they think it just means practice, but it does not. And that's what this is all about. What the great performers really do is this activity that the researchers called deliberate practice. And it is different from what most people think practice is new elements. They're not complicated, but they're really important one, it's designed specifically to improve your performance at this moment in your development, that means your practice isn't the same as my practice or anybody else's practice. And furthermore, it isn't the same as your practice was two weeks ago. And it's not the same as your practice will be two weeks from now, because your ability will change over that period. So that's, that's the first main thing. It's designed specifically for you to improve your performance right now.

Unknown: 17:59

Second thing is,

Geoff Colvin: 18:03

it is designed and this is the real heart of it. It is designed to push you just beyond your current ability, it doesn't push you to do things, you have no idea how to do because then you're just lost, you have no idea. And it doesn't get you any place. But at the same time, it doesn't let you operate fully within your current abilities. Because if you just do that, you never grow. It is constantly pushing you to do things that are just beyond what you can currently do. That's why it always has to be adjusted. Because once you learn to do those things, then you have to be pushed again, to do the next set of things you can't quite do. So that's that's the real heart of it. Now, there's more. Typically, it can be repeated a lot. The researchers noticed that the practice activities that were really effective could be repeated at high frequency, you can do them a lot. They didn't know back when they were doing this research, that that actually would connect to later findings about the brain. But it turns out that if you do certain things with high repetition over and over, it actually makes physical changes in your brain having to do with a substance called called myelin, which, in fact turns out to be something that characterises all the great performers in every field, but it can be repeated a lot that turns out to be important. And feedback on the results is continuously available. This just makes sense. You can't get better if you don't know how you're doing. If you're working on something, but you don't get any feedback. Two things are guaranteed to happen. One, you won't get any better. And two, you'll stop caring, because you're not seeing any result. So you have to get feedback continuously. Another finding about it is that it's very demanding mentally. And this applies even to people who were practising physical things, sports of any kind, you might suppose that the limit on their practice is their physical ability to, you know, hit golf balls or kick, football ball. So soccer, soccer balls, or something, but it isn't. What the great performers consistently say is that what limits their practice ability is the mental fatigue of engaging in the practice when you're doing this, right. It's very demanding mentally. And one other thing that has to be said, This isn't a deliberate practice is an activity that isn't work. And it isn't play. It's something in between. and it isn't necessarily fun. It's hard work. All of the great performers emphasise this. It's hard work. It isn't necessarily fun. But it's very, very rewarding, because this is what makes them great. So that's a kind of extended answer to your question. But you asked the central question. So I really wanted to explain that.

Marcus Kirsch: 21:33

Now that that's great. And I think there's actually two desert, there's a lot of things I recognised when I did that. Looking at the sports, I've done anything from skateboarding, to gymnastics, or climbing, which are very, sometimes very, very complex things to do. There may be a bit less complex than, let's say, lifting weights. But even oddly enough, even there, you find, you either see some of those characteristics happening and not happening. And you sometimes hear about it, I remember I remember, I think I was watching a documentary, I think it was back in Arnold Schwarzenegger was pumping ions, where he actually described a bit his training process. And he said, You know, he goes, he goes into training with a mindset. And therefore, he can always do more, he always hits it harder. And he always challenges himself. So and just knowing what you're doing, why you're doing and therefore observing how you're doing. And breaking it down a bit more, makes even a simple. Let's call it a simple activity, like lifting weights, quite complex, and you will always do it a bit different, and therefore you pushing it, because what he obviously has to do, he has to hit muscles really hard in all different areas. So they develop fully as fully as possible. So you can't just do the same thing again. And again, it would only go one way, and the rest of it would suffer. So it would not be a holistic approach. That's even more true. In skateboarding, where you have a very complex movement, and you have to really break it down, you have to step by step, and you have to push yourself, and most of the things you do in skateboarding is actually failing. Yeah, so you're trying a lot of different things to find that one, wiggle pass through that gets you to the end and gets the actual result. And the one in the gym, I take another gym. Story, he is also that I was quite surprised. And it's interesting to see and I don't know if you if you go to the gym, and you see the same thing, I don't know if you've noticed that. So I see I see two different types of people going to the gym, there's the people who you can you can see they're working hard on it, they're quite focused, and did they look different already, they're quite a bit more about it. And their, their, their body bills look different, because they're more into it, then you get to sort of the casual gym goer. And it's not just that the body doesn't look or has the same results and don't have to go more or less than that's a difference in results, but also that you see them checking on their phone every five minutes, don't even seem to be actually there and present in the moment when they do what they do.

Geoff Colvin: 24:08

You've made several really important points. One, you may think that people who are lifting weights, you know, don't really have to focus on it. But But you go to the gym and work with weights and as it happens, I do too. And I have it's so funny because I've had exactly the same experience. When you look around, you do see two different kinds of people. You know, when it comes to exercising with weights, form is really important. If you don't do it with the right form, you're not getting very much benefit. And you see some people who are really intensely for just what you said intensely focused on the form and other people who are doing the same exercise supposedly the same exercise, but there Form is terrible. They don't either know, or they don't care or something. And they're just not getting the benefit of it. It is always mentally draining, to do deliberate practice in a way that's really helping.

Troy Norcross: 25:19

So can I can I spin it to a to a business context. So one of the things that, and it's, it sounds very kind of anecdotal, that a lot of the millennial generation really values lots and lots of training, training, they want personal development, they want that to be included as part of their overall compensation package. And equally, we get anecdotal evidence or stories that says, you know, what, they really don't want to do the base work, they want to jump right in, they want to be promoted, they want to go go go. And I think that there's an opportunity to repackage how we, in business, which is both kind of the employee and the business leaders, look at some of the base work that they're doing. So when you spend working as a graphic artist, retouching 1000 photos, that's not grunt work that you're having to do, because it's your first year, that is indeed building the foundation of skills that allows you to be a senior graphic artist somewhere down the line. And if we can reposition this as this is indeed an opportunity for you to do deliberate practice and actually up your skill, and to provide that feedback to provide that, you know, challenge just beyond where you are, we could actually reposition that whole thing from negative. You're asking me to do grunt work to positive you're actually helping me build the foundation that will launch my career in the future? How do you think that fits?

Geoff Colvin: 26:52

Yes, absolutely. And I can tell you that I hear a lot from people about exactly this. Yes. What you're saying is absolutely true. And people who have been through it, I think, all understand the the truth, the validity of what you're saying. This, the work you do in the entry level jobs, may seem like drudgery, but those who take the right approach to it. It's just what we were talking about earlier, you know, those who see it as something that they want to get better at, and to focus on the details and are trying to learn will find when they look back that it was incredibly valuable to them. So yeah, I think there is a great opportunity to do just what you said. In other words, frame it in a different way, and probably rearrange the procedure a little bit. I mean, I can imagine ways it could be done, that would help remind people or show them in the first place, that they are actually learning critical skills. And there would probably, you know, one thing about the grunt work that all of us have been through at one point or another is that maybe we weren't, maybe we weren't getting a lot of feedback on it. Maybe it could be made much more efficient and effective. If we did get more feedback on it. And what everything we learned about millennials and Gen Z is that they they at least save that they value they crave feedback. So there could be a great opportunity in this. Now, there's another angle to it, that I hear a lot from people in different industry. And that is that technology is eliminating a lot of that grunt work. And to senior people in the in the businesses. This is a real concern. For example, people at the big global accounting firms have told me that more and more of what they did, when they were starting out, which was absolute grunt work, you know, it was just detail seemed like drudgery. But that's how they learned the business. That's how they learned what really made up the the content of the the substance of what they did. Well, technology now does more and more of that stuff, and does it faster, cheaper and better than human beings could do it. And their concern is how are the young people we hired today, going to learn the substance of this business, the nuts and bolts of what really makes it work if they don't have to do that work. And we don't want them to do that work because the technology does it better. And it's going to take innovation Thinking, to train them to give them those skills. Because, you know, the The world is changing, and it's gonna be a big challenge.

Marcus Kirsch: 30:09

Definitely a wider discussion actually to talk about, you know, the kind of skills we wanted to keep and the kind of skills we wanted to learn and identifying which skills are becoming commodities or have become commodities already, which are automated? It's a really great question. But again, just to maybe go yet again, back on on the feedback part, because the feedback part, regardless of the skills needed in the future, there's something very, very crucial here. And when I look at the military, for example, you have after action review, where you have a particular format of feedback, where the rank doesn't matter, and everyone can speak out what's good, what's bad. And then actions are defined based on that. I see the same in Agile. So we have transformation project, agile is often a methodology to be used, where you have stand ups and sprint reviews, where you do the same thing you review what worked and what didn't openly discuss it, and openly take actions on it. And the same has been the same. With my background, as a designer in design, you will do a design crit, where bunch of people look at what someone has done, and then discuss it from various different angles and improve. So there's a lot of different areas and practices where these methodologies have been already acknowledged. So maybe my question is, how can we help organisations understand that value a bit better? Or is there some issue with the cop with the current managerial hierarchy that often suppresses that? Well, what are your thoughts on that?

Geoff Colvin: 31:45

Yeah, it's a wonderful question. Because you have identified one of the big problems in I would venture to say, most large organisations and maybe most small organisations too. And that is the absence of frequent, rigorous, honest feedback. As we've just been discussing, the no one gets any better if they don't get good feedback. And we all know that the way it used to be done in a lot of organisations was you'd have an annual evaluation or an annual review. Well, that's nearly useless. I mean, finding out, you know, being told that what you did something you did 11 months previously, could have been done better some other way is a very little use. And there's a bigger personal I mean, that's, that was a lousy practice. But there's an even bigger problem. And that is, in many organisations, the culture is such that frequent, rigorous, honest, feedback just isn't okay. It isn't done. And no one frequently any way, no one has the courage to violate the norms of the culture, and to start giving frequent, rigorous, honest feedback when it just isn't done. And in fact, there are examples of people who come into an organisation and decide to do that, anyway, they're going to be honest, and frequent. And the the, everybody freaks out, they don't know what to make of this. And what's so important to remember, is that often, the reason people don't give frequent, rigorous honest feedback, which obviously often means negative feedback, is that they think it's, it's kinder, it's more humane, not to do it. But the minute you say that out loud, you realise that, of course, it's the opposite of the truth. It's not kind or humane to tell people that they're doing a fine job. When they're not to be broken. I

Troy Norcross: 34:12

can I jump in? Yeah, please do. Tell me is it? What is it risk? What is it that people are afraid of? That prevents them from doing it? It's not in my opinion, that it's not a humane thing to do that it's not nice. They're afraid of something. They were afraid of blowback, they're afraid of breaking relationships. Most people are not doing something out of fear, they may put a pretty bow on it, then they call it Oh, it's not a very humane thing to do. But I think that there's something else we are such a risk averse business culture, that people are always assessing. What's the risk if I do this? What's the risk if I do nothing? Yep.

Geoff Colvin: 34:53

That sounds right on the money to me. And yeah, people are It is certainly true that fear drives a huge proportion of all behaviour. We know that that's a recipe for bad performance. And yet, I think for exactly the reasons you say, most people persist in, in sticking with the norms of the culture,

Troy Norcross: 35:19

it's also a recipe for mediocrity.

Unknown: 35:23

Yes, guaranteed guarantee.

Troy Norcross: 35:29

I think I'm not afraid of having an opinion. And most people know that I'm not afraid of having an opinion. And I think a lot of it is down to the delivery, a lot of it is down to the understanding the intent of frequent, honest, rigorous feedback. It's the honest part that scares people the most, for sure, you know, and Okay, I'm gonna give it to you, in an honest approach. I'm not trying to belittle you, I'm not trying to get promoted over you. I'm actually trying to give you some honest feedback. And the other part is to be equally open and vulnerable to accepting and receiving that same kind of feedback. As long as it's a two way street. It's, it's easier,

Marcus Kirsch: 36:14

right? Yeah, from my experience, there is an because I've done a lot of workshops with people and you essentially get a bunch of people in a room, let's say 20 to 30 people, and they will have a varied range of expertise in the subject matter. So I might have done a workshop before even have basic skills on what you're trying to teach, and others have never heard of what you're bringing to the table. So when you have to manage a room like that, one of the main primary things to do is to set up a safe scenario, which is often why we take people out of their office into a room. Because if you're in a room where the rules, the normal rules don't apply, which means and by normal rules, I mean, that you get that social dynamic where people cannot speak up, and you show very early on, that you can speak out, it doesn't matter, there's no wrong here. So then then that that makes things easier, it creates a different kind of dynamic, a different kind of culture, at least temporarily. On top of that, oftentimes, I have to actively work on especially if I look at introverted people who don't have a tendency to speak up to understand who is like that, and then pick them out and go, I haven't heard anything from you for for for half an hour, what are your thoughts, it's a piece of work to do with that. And I can easily imagine if a team doesn't consciously do that, then they will go with whoever speaks out loudest, whoever is most confident, and the rest of the team will never be hurt. And you will not get the kind of de risking benefit of a diverse team that you would normally get. It is part of my work in a workshop not just to teach the things but actually create the right dynamic in a room in order to get the best out of those sessions for sure. Well, yeah.

Geoff Colvin: 38:02

Great point. And, and I bet you can do it in those sessions, I bet that over time, you can, you know, get people to feel safe about speaking up. It's it, which is a huge step forward. It's one of those things that you know, in an organisation, it, if the CEO starts doing it, it will cascade down through the organisation. But actually, it's a great point also that a lot of it is in the delivery, it is an art. giving feedback is an art. And exactly how it is said turns out to make a big difference. Of course, the the point that we don't want to stray from is great performers demand that the feedback, they value what they go out of their way to seek it. And that is one of the big differentiators between them and the rest of the normal people in the world.

Troy Norcross: 39:17

And I don't think that we make enough of a point of the fact that this deliberate practice has to happen, that it isn't fun, that feedback is critical. But on the other end of this, there are great rewards, right? There's great achievement possible.

Geoff Colvin: 39:37

A very important point and it goes back early in life. I mean, one of the just it's funny, because just what you said, is almost exactly the answer that I got. When I was talking with one of the researchers in this field. In fact, the preeminent researcher in this field, Anders Ericsson, who teaches Florida State nowadays, but I was talking with him, I'll get long ago and said, What's the research frontier? When it comes to great performance? What is it that now needs to be understood better. And he said, he thought the research frontier was parenting. Because for people to get really good in an awful lot of fields, they have to start as children. And he, regardless of whether they can start as children or not, he said, It's vital for parents to make their kids understand that the road to great performance is understood, we know how to do it, we know how you get from now to being one of the world's best is understood, we know how this is done. And it's available to you, you can go down that road. But it is a long, hard road. And you can go down as far as you want. And the rewards are fantastic. At the same time, you need to understand that it isn't fast and easy. And we actually live in a culture where most things that aren't fast and easy are presented as being fast and easy. Because it makes for better TV, but as long as it but giving that message to kids, he thought is critical and not well understood.

Troy Norcross: 41:43

Okay, so let me let me go on to a variation on that.

Geoff Colvin: 41:47

Yes,

Troy Norcross: 41:48

you can give me the most expensive baby grand piano in the most expensive Auditorium in the world. I know how to read music, I can play the notes. I know where all the keys are. And I still can't play music. I have no sense of rhythm. And I am tone deaf. And I don't believe any amount of deliberate practice is ever going to make me Chopin. I do believe that there's a certain amount, this is my challenge to you. Is there a certain amount of at least natural aptitude, whether it's sports, or whether it's music, or whether it's whatever, that will give parents and ability to pick a direction and say, Okay, you've got the basics for this, if you want to be amazing at this, this is how you do it. If you want to be good enough that if you go swimming, you aren't going to drown. That's that's kind of where you need to go over there.

Unknown: 42:44

Right? Right.

Geoff Colvin: 42:47

Here's the answer. The researchers couldn't substantiate it right now. There are certainly and kind of, obviously, physical traits that people are born with meaning the their size, for example, or the size that they become. And those can obviously have a huge effect on the activities that they would be good or bad at. And that just simply means that if you're seven feet tall, you're never going to be an Olympic gymnast, no matter how much practice you do. Yeah, that doesn't work. And if you're five feet tall, you're never going to be a professional volleyball player, or a professional basketball player. Because again, it's just not going to work out. And there are some other things you can say for example, the best pitchers in baseball have certain physical characteristics that are often specific to them. And there are a few other examples like that. But those are physical things. When it comes to natural ability, like saying I'm tone deaf, which a lot of people say, or I have no sense of rhythm. Most of the instructors in that field will and the researchers in those fields will tell you that, that that's almost never true. In other words, that if a kid is trained from an early enough age, they will have just as good a sense of rhythm and just as good a sense of notes as anyone has and in fact, what most of us call perfect pitch with the researcher is called absolute pitch which just means if I say to you, sing the note be flat right now. You can do it. Which we all have thought, I think was an innate trait that you were born with it or not know, that can be taught also, if it's taught in the right way from an early, early enough.

Troy Norcross: 45:12

And so don't don't tell my mother but actually could have learned to play the piano. She won't like that.

Geoff Colvin: 45:20

I can, Okay, I won't tell her I promise, but it's not an uncommon story. The point is the researchers are saying the boundaries, the limitations that we think we have. Well, they're not denying that those things exist entirely, but they're saying they are a lot less common and a lot less restrictive than most of us think they are.

Troy Norcross: 45:45

I think we've got a lot that we can do in the business community to kind of get past some of these preconceived notions. Yeah, like the ones that I'm carrying around with me that I just I just illustrated. I think we're gonna go to the last question. I'm going to pass over to Marcus.

Geoff Colvin: 46:00

Yes.

Marcus Kirsch: 46:01

Yes. So I'd like to jump into two adjacent areas that I think are very topical, of course. So first of all, as you say, Jeff, talent is overrated. It seems that humans are underrated, too, which is a new one of your books, learning quickly and efficiently is a value that is gold dust for a lot of organisations and people moving into a very new kind of world very quickly. So can you tell us a little bit about the relevancy to both books on to our world today, please?

Geoff Colvin: 46:36

Yeah, you bet. Yeah, the book humans are underrated is all about the value of deep skills of human interaction, how just how we interact with one another in any way, in person, or through an online meeting or any other way. And the basic argument of that book is that those skills are the skills of deep human interaction will become more economically valuable. as technology advances, we see more and more examples of it more and more evidence of it every day, because the technology is taking over more and more of the skills that don't require deep human interaction. All kinds of old fashioned drudgery is being done, not just faster, and cheaper than humans could do it. But it's being done faster, cheaper, and better. And that includes very high level kinds of work. That not that's the things that we never thought technology would take over. That, nonetheless, technology is taking over. Because exactly what while you're doing it, it doesn't require any human interaction, for example, surgery, surgery, surgical robots are being developed, that are not like today's surgical robots, which aren't really robots, they are power tools that human surgeons use, I'm talking about autonomous surgical robots that will do the surgery completely on their own. In the industry, that is clearly just a matter of time, progress is being made. Well, you would be astounded what some of these autonomous devices can do already. No one ever thought that a surgeon could be replaced by a machine. But even surgeons have told me that it's going to happen, lawyers, also a lot of their work, not in the courtroom. But other work that they do for which they get paid a lot of money are being done by computers, for example, the discovery phase of a lawsuit where somebody has to read these enormous amounts of documents files, to see what's relevant and what is not. There are now software programmes that can read those documents much faster than people 24 hours a day, they don't get tired. They can read and understand those things sort them for relevance, at least as well as human lawyers do. And they can do something human lawyers can't do which in which is in 100,000 pages of documents. They can spot patterns that no human would ever see. They're doing the work faster, cheaper, and better. So this is just a way of saying more and more what is going to be left to us as humans. As a way to create value is going to be the skills of deep human interaction. I'll stop there for the moment. But you mentioned the the world we are now in and have only recently entered this world of lockdowns and social distancing, and stay at home orders. And that gets to a separate angle, which we can talk about in a second. But I want to just stop talking for a minute.

Marcus Kirsch: 50:28

Yeah, I think that's, that's, that sounds really, really great. Interesting. So my thoughts tend to be usually I go to, to the idea of wicked problems, which are, you know, more complex complex is the wrong characteristic of basically moving targets as a problem, something that you're trying to solve, while you're solving it, it involves not building a plane, building a bridge is no such thing. It will always be a plane and a bridge. It's a known problem space. Whereas if you look at healthcare, you look at crime, these kind of things, they tend to be moving targets, right? So do you think it's therefore a benefit that some of these aspects are heavily automated, so they would that we have actually more time for the trickier projects and therefore upskilling ourselves and focusing more on skills that are way above what we normally would have had to learn first? Can we skip straight into the more complex stuff? And does that actually help us maybe use our brains more to the actual capacity?

Troy Norcross: 51:36

Yeah. And before, before you before you answer, I've got a degree in computer science, right. And I started off learning binary arithmetic. And then I built machine code. And then I was finally taught Fortran 77, I'm really showing my age. And, and everything was indeed a layer. And my ability to programme and understand next generation languages and beyond, is only as good as it is because I started with the foundation. So even though we may have more brain capacity to to solve the bigger problems, I think it comes back to do you have the foundations upon which to rely when you're solving the problems that are 30,000 feet up?

Geoff Colvin: 52:18

Yeah, yeah, that that is true mastery, because you understand how things got to be the way they are. And if you don't understand that, then figuring out the change that will work can be really difficult. And so I think you're right on the money, that under you know, having a deep understanding of how those problems came to be a is a is a big value. And in fact, I mean, we hear stories, we hear anecdotal evidence all the time. And I bet you hear a lot more than I do, about people who do have mastery of some of the old technology having to be found and brought in, because companies run into problems that no one present at the company has any idea how to figure out is this something you've

Troy Norcross: 53:20

heard of, I know of a 78 year old engineer, who still gets put on aeroplanes and flown around to fix coal fired power plants, because he's the only one left that understands why they were built the way they were built.

Geoff Colvin: 53:37

And that is, it's well, it's a big opportunity for some people obviously. And the larger point is there's an awful lot of knowledge that is valuable, that isn't written any place it isn't recorded in place. Arguably, there will be less of such forgotten knowledge as the world becomes more digital and everything is recorded and searchable, more and more, but at least for now. This is a big phenomenon. And it is really important.

Troy Norcross: 54:18

So let's let's talk about COVID. And we were talking a bit before we started the recording, you've got people that are spending not all people but a lot of people who are spending a lot of time they've got time on their hands. How can they best take advantage of this? And what are the challenges they might come up against? In in learning something new? Yeah.

Geoff Colvin: 54:43

It is true there are plenty of people Now not all it's a subset but there are people who've got a lot of time on their hands. They get no you know, for at least a while can afford to take some leisure time and do some things that they never had. had the time to do before. And so we see a lot of people deciding they're going to learn a language, or learn a skill of one kind or another. And based on the all of the principles of deliberate practice, how we go about that is, in a sense, pretty simple, at least, it's pretty simple in concept. When one has identified the skill that one wants to learn, what you need is, in almost all cases, some kind of a mentor, coach, teacher, and the reason you need that is what we said earlier, this is a question of practice activities being defined, being designed just for you, for you with the abilities you currently have, at the current stage of your development. And for most of us, it takes somebody else it takes an outside observer, to figure out who is a master of the skill we're trying to learn. It takes an outside observer to figure out what we can do, we're we tend to be poor observers, honest observers of ourselves. I think we all know that. And so we need someone else to look at us who can figure out what stage we're at what therefore is the appropriate practice activity for us. And then to give us that all important feedback that we were talking about before. So in a way, the most important thing, well, not just in a way, the most important thing for starters, is to find some kind of teacher or mentor or coach. In some cases, you can at least start without a human being, because you can take little tests of one kind or another depending on the activity, and gauge where you stand and then start to make progress on your own. Another key, as we said, is constantly being pushed just beyond where you are now, constantly pushed to do things you can't quite do. And that's not really fun. You know, early in the session here, Marcus made a point in just in passing, that is so important. He said, most of skateboarding is failing. And that is so true of almost everything. Because think about it. If you are constantly being pushed to do things you can't quite do, well, then you're going to fail most of the time that you try to do them. I did some calculations about an Olympic skater, figure skater, gold medalist, Olympic figure skater. And there's research on figure skaters as there is on practically everybody, saying that the great figure skaters spend most of their time on moves that they can't quite do. mediocre figure skaters spend most of their time doing things they already know how to do pretty well. And so the great ones are the ones who end up landing on their behind on cold, hard ice. Most of the time, it's failing. And it's not a lot of fun. So we tend to avoid it. We need somebody to push us to make us do that. Because that's the only way we get better.

Troy Norcross: 58:52

I think the word fail immediately triggers in me the consultant. So I started jumping in on the word fail. Because again, part of innovation is indeed failing and figuring out what doesn't work and the learning process that goes with that. And yet the majority of enterprises, when they get into an innovation programme, they say after two years, you haven't delivered anything, you haven't moved the needle, you haven't saved anything, no new business ideas, this has been a failure. And then people get fired. And then they're completely afraid of failing. And even people on innovation teams are afraid of trying new things because they might fail and then they're going to they're going to be judged. And and I think again, it's positioning failure as incremental learning moving towards mastery as adding incremental value. Sometimes value you cannot put on to the FDS spreadsheet. That's that's one of those things that I think from a business perspective we constantly are fighting against, especially innovation

Geoff Colvin: 59:57

fits exactly with my experience, too.

Marcus Kirsch: 1:00:01

Thanks for bringing this skateboarding up again. skateboard videos always have a section of slams and bails, which basically is the terminology for someone messing up failing and falling pretty badly at times, sometimes funnily and sometimes very badly. And the internet's full of those back into VHS tape days. So here I'm showing my age now is that on every skateboard video, you would have a section of 510 minutes, that is just those. They are basically the blooper is the blooper reel of skateboarding. It's just that the damage is harsher than in any movie or TV recording scenario, of course, but it's celebrated. So the interesting aspect is really that it's part of the culture, messing up borderline, hurting yourself is part of the culture, you'll you will have lost some skin, you will have fallen knocked your head, maybe knocked teeth, a tooth out. It's one of the first thing you actually learn when you skateboard. You learn how to fall it's the same in judo, where before you actually learn any more, so you learn how to fall, you learn how to fail, how to how to do that, of course, it's very important and part of it, because it will always happen to some extent. And in skateboarding, obviously, Yes, you do. 100 tries, and maybe one or two might succeed, the other 98 are slammed and you will fail. And it's celebrated. The culture celebrates, it's so much part of that culture that the content of someone being filmed failing is a value to the rest of the community. So that's really interesting. Again, where the skateboarding thing comes in, I might might surely pull that out for another workshop. Now to go to go to the very last question that I'm just gonna add on here out of yet again, personal curiosity. And because I've been looking a lot in terms of skills and learning into the difference between specialists, and polymath specialists, which are very vertical, knowing one thing really, really well. And then you have polymath, which have, by definition, around about at least three different skills, that also around a top 25% or something like that. And the cross pollination of those skill sets actually create unique opportunities for people like that. I'm, I'm a person like that I know a lot about a lot of different things. And I'm not a high lead specialist specialist. So my value is different. So question to you is, do you see, as much as a lot of people are still trying to be world class at something? The value in learning a skill to certain level quicker, but having multiple ones, in comparison to specialists spending a lot of energy of driving one skill and one skill only to the highest possible level? What are your thoughts on that?

Geoff Colvin: 1:02:48

Yeah, it's a very important point, because this is a decision we all have to make. We all are good at certain skills, and just good enough to be useful to us. And that's it. So I just mean, in our lives. So for example, pretty much every adult has learned how to drive. And we're not expert, racecar drivers. But we can drive without even thinking about it. We got good enough, and then we didn't advance any further. And that was fine. It didn't make any sense for us to advance even further, for that matter, a lot of sports that most people do. We're just good enough. You know, we're not the world's greatest golfer or anything else like that. But we're good enough to go have fun with it. And that's fine. That's all we need to do. At the same time, what are you going to be? And that's valuable, right? And even in work, having some knowledge, some skills, is that that you're not world class act, that's still valuable, because it gives you a perspective. In other parts of the business, you understand the whole, much better because you have some of the skills that are involved across the enterprise, let's say or even more broadly than that, that the question that we all have to answer for ourselves and is strictly for ourselves, is at What thing? Do we want to be really, really good? And how far down that road do we want to go? That's really what it comes down to? Because we know the road to World Class great performance. We know how to get there. Now the research has shown it. The question is how far down that road do we want to go? Because when you look at the people who have gone as far as possible, the world's greatest musicians or athletes, they have often had to sacrifice a few Jamal in the rest of their lives. Sometimes they've had to sacrifice relationships and other things that are extremely valuable. Their life can in some sense, be very narrow. They are so totally focused on this one thing. And it may be that a lot of us, even though we know how to get there, we don't want to get there. We want to have a life. That's fine. That's, that's a perfect, you're allowed to say that. It's a perfectly legitimate answer. But we have to face it. And ideally, really face it explicitly, consciously, say, how far down this road do I want to go? There will always be world class, great performers. And there will always be valuable value to having what you were describing a wide sense of knowledge and skills that are specifically related to just one thing. There's no good or bad, there's no best or worst, but it is a decision. And if we make that decision, consciously, being honest only with ourselves, because that's all that matters. That's important.

Troy Norcross: 1:06:17

And I think that word conscious is is the real key. I mean, a lot of people are perfectly happy being a leaf on the stream, letting the stream take them. And other people are consciously actively assertively, you're making defined choices, and neither one is right or wrong over the other. But they're they're two different approaches. And if we're going to pick one thing to be good at, let's not sleepwalk into it, let's

Marcus Kirsch: 1:06:42

let's pick it, I think is a really great positive final, final statement to make whatever the new scenario will be. Jeff is really lovely talking to you. It's very inspiring. And at this point, I'll just thank you again for your time, and for your answers and for the great conversation we had. Thank you,

Geoff Colvin: 1:07:02

Marcus. Troy, this was a great discussion. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed it very much. Thank you for the opportunity.

Troy Norcross: 1:07:13

You've been listening to the wicked podcast with CO hosts Marcus Kirsch and me Troy Norcross,

Marcus Kirsch: 1:07:19

please subscribe on podomatic, iTunes or Spotify. You can find all relevant links in the show notes. Please tell us your thoughts in the comment section and let us know about any books for future episodes.

Troy Norcross: 1:07:32

You can also get in touch with us directly on Twitter on at wicked and beyond or at Troy underscore Norcross, also learn more about the wicked company book and the wicked company project at wicked company.com