Training and Practice are Different: A Rant.

First part of the Rant: Stop using Training and Practice interchangeably. Just stop. Don’t do it.

Strap in… this is one of those essays when delivered verbally results in my teenage daughter chortling and muttering “old man shouts at clouds”.

In the corporate world, in the military, in academia, in government and in schools I have noted a trend over the years. It was glacial (at least in my memory) at first, and seems to have picked up momentum and transformed into an avalanche.  I refer to the knee jerk reaction of proposing “training” as the solution to all ills, mistakes, problems and calamities. For the next little bit, I’d like to dispel the notion of “training” as a panacea. In particular, I’d like to point out that without training’s really annoying but incredibly valuable sibling “practice”, training results in little tangible gain for anyone. 

First part of the Rant: Stop using Training and Practice interchangeably. Just stop. Don’t do it.

What’s the difference, i.e. why is the old man shouting at this particular cloud? 

Great question, glad you asked.

Training is the learning and initial attempt to reproduce a new skill. It takes a person who is without said skill/knowledge and formally introduces them to it. Good training will include 1) why this skill/knowledge is relevant/important/beneficial 2) the prerequisite knowledge/skills/attributes contributing to success/excellence of the skill or use/understanding of the knowledge 3) a basic schema of milestones correlating with incompetence/competence/excellence/mastery of the skill/knowledge 4) a plan with concrete steps to pursue ascension of this schema.  The best one can hope for at the end of an initial training, is to be familiar.

Practice is the systematic, intentional, repetitive performance of the skill or use/application of the knowledge with frequent assessment/reassessment/feedback and necessary corrective actions to improve acquisition, refine and improve performance, and increase consistency. I can hear you huffing already…despite being separated in both time and space. I can actually  hear you shouting “nu-uh!” at the screen and pronouncing me the god-king of the dunderheads, so irretrievably and irredeemably stupid as to warrant no further attention. Please, press on and humor me, dear reader…press on.

And if Clark misses a shot, or Judge strikes out, nobody is going to send them a powerpoint on the basics of hand eye coordination, and award them a certificate of completion after they rapid fire click thru it. 

An example to prove my point. I learned how to swing a golf club early in my life. My dad and my brothers, reasonably competent in the activity themselves, woke me up way too early for a teenager who had been out carousing, and said “get dressed- yer goin’ golfin”. Not yet possessing the cognitive horsepower to argue I grunted and did as I was told. We played nine holes, and they were pretty patient with showing me the basic mechanics of golf. Club selection, addressing the ball, swing, follow thru, and the inevitable bouts of Tourette’s resulting from that little ball going wherever it wanted anyway. How’d I do? Fine, all things considered, but obviously I didn’t go enter the U.S. Open. For all the informality my family did a nice job with the criteria of “training” outlined above. I became familiar with the idea of golf, and firmly established somewhere on the spectrum of incompetent to competent. The experience even gave me a decent idea of what to do next (lessons, videos, books etc) to acquire more knowledge. Over the subsequent decade that’s pretty much what happened. I acquired more knowledge and skills thru repetitive experiences that formally or informally fit the aforementioned training criteria. Did I improve? Sure…with some caveats. I improved for a short time after the training, and in particular with whatever skill I was exposed to or shown the next level criteria for.

Second part of the Rant: Did the benefits of training last? 

Of course not.

I was “trained” but I wasn’t building automaticity, muscle memory, or consistency. This is the function of “practice”.  When I would practice, i.e. when I would play 9-27 holes of golf a week, and go to the driving range, pitching range, putting green in between rounds to intentionally and repetitively perform the skills of the game, I improved greatly. Somewhere in the last half of the last year of med school (much easier schedule, and I saved up all my breaks/vacations/holidays to allow for some leisure during the final 2 months of the program), I was reliably shooting something just worse than bogey golf (i.e. one stroke more than par on each whole, around 45 for 9 holes, or mid 90ish on 18 holes). Again, not tour material, but 20 strokes better on 9 holes than where I started. That was 20+ yrs ago…based on that peak performance history, how do you think I fared last summer when I took my son out for nine holes? Spoiler alert, neither of us had been on a golf course for 5 years. It went, predictably, pretty badly. There were some moments of sheer brilliance – one or two shots every few holes that made me remember “what right looks like”. But…

Without practice to cement the skills I previously trained, and make them reliable and consistent, they (more or less by definition) were unable to be called upon and counted on.

Here comes the “but what about people who are just natural, the geniuses that walk amongst us?”  Yeah…no.

Several points about this line of thinking.  First off, every bit of systematic research into prodigies shows they are either non-existent or so rare that if you were one, you’d know it by your status as world champion record holder.  More than likely what would happen due to your “natural” aptitude for a skill + the belief that it’s “just a talent thing” is that you would be lulled into a false sense of superiority, leading to complacency and self-satisfaction; thus preventing you from ever putting the work into developing the skill to true mastery.  Mozart didn’t actually pop out of the womb and right Eine Kleine Nachtmusik…he was 21 when he composed that piece. He was exposed to music at an early age – his dad was one of the leading music teachers on the continent and wrote one of the first books ever on how to teach the violin. He was constantly around music, jealously watching his older sister’s lessons, and pestering his father to teach him. His father relented and Mozart began instruction at the age of 4. He was singularly minded in his focus and his commitment to practice (probably the real innate/inborn attribute that benefitted him).  The spectacle of a 6 year old and a 10 year old musical duo was a great novelty and likely contributed to the recollection and records of the legend of this young prodigy. http://willpowered.com/learn/true-secret-mozart

Yes, he did “write music at a young age”…transcribed by his father. He didn’t compose anything enduring or noteworthy until 10 years or so into his evolution with music/composition. Even for someone with supposed “inborn genius” success required formal training, and a decade of relentless practice. Malcolm Gladwell expands on this idea in an entire book about the concept of “10,000” hours resulting in mastery with well-known examples including the Beatles.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book) And yes, I know there is controversy between Gladwell’s usage of the “10,000 hours” and the original authors, but I assure you none of the involved parties is promoting the idea that excellence and mastery are best explained by natural talent/genius without the effort/volume of practice. 

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard -Tim Notke, basketball coach

This quote is not a refutation or denial of talent. To be explicit, I don’t refute talent either. My daughter has a natural predilection toward music that my son just doesn’t have. I exposed both of them to my love of and aptitude for music- playing, teaching, jamming,  listening.  My son loves music, he’s developed his own taste and favorite catalog. But hand him a guitar (despite my sitting with him for hours to teach the basic cowboy chords), and he is revealed as the incompetent musician that he is. My daughter on the other hand can stroll up to a piano and be casually entertaining with her ability. I once caught her playing a recital piece in all 12 keys…”just because dad”

Whatever is missing or present (aptitude, commitment, interest) the end result of an incompetent musician and a pretty good one came from the same stimulus, environment, and genetic potential. It isn’t a huge leap to realize that this difference is the result of my son never practicing once, and my daughter practicing relentlessly.

More recent arguments about “practice” focus on the nuances on the nature and necessity of practice, while all stipulating that training without practice is fruitless. These include “practice makes perfect” vs “practice makes permanent”; “10,000 hours of practice” vs “1000’s of hours of deliberate practice”.  None of these arguments dispels the need for practice…just the nature of the practice, the need for a coach/expert or other objective feedback source to get the most benefit from practice, and the volume of practice required. 

So, where does this leave us? Remember my original point was the problem of “something went wrong = the entire group needs training”.  I’ll spare you the rant on root cause analysis by summing up with “there are a host of reasons why things go wrong, and human error due to a lack of prior knowledge addressable via remedial training is but a small portion of the reasons”. 

Additionally, in the instances where something went wrong due to human error, how often is the underlying cause of a human error a lack of training? I’ll admit it’s not never – I showed a pitcher on my youth baseball team the basic grip and mechanics of throwing a cutter before a game. He threw it a few times and we agreed it would be a good pitch to develop in the last few weeks of the season to have something new for the playoffs. He tried it out during the subsequent game (yup, about 90 minutes after being exposed to the rudimentary basics)…that was a year ago, and I’m not sure the resultant homerun has landed yet. He actually threw it twice in the same at-bat. One time it worked beautifully, but he located the pitch incorrectly on the inside of the plate, and when it broke further inside it was called a ball. The next time he threw it, he located it perfectly, but hung it (it didn’t break inside, or at all frankly), and it was essentially a medium pace fastball right down the middle to a phenomenal hitter. This was absolutely a problem of inadequate training, 100% of which was my fault for teaching new things right before a game rather than at practice. He was exposed to the skill, and had a decent grasp of the basics of the pitch, but not the context of when to use it, how best to use it, and the nuance of how to set it up/place it etc. Further, he didn’t have the repetitive PRACTICE to make the pitch reliable and automatic, particularly under the pressure of a game situation against one of the best hitters in the state. So yeah, duh, of course training matters! 

However, just training him on the new pitch 3 days earlier, without repetitive, deliberate practice, complete with feedback, corrective action and positive reinforcement would have probably resulted in this batter performing the same kind of space experiment on the baseball, albeit delayed 3 days from training rather than 90 minutes. And if I addressed this moonshot with “well I trained him, but I guess it didn’t stick…I’ll have to explain it to him again…” and simply repeated the training sans practice…same outcome is gonna happen. 

Consider it from my young pitcher’s perspective…he makes a mistake, and all I can come up with is to repeat to him what he already knows. Rather than simply throwing repetitive training at the problem, diagnosing the specifics of the error, and tailoring training is far more fruitful. And while tailoring the training to specifically address the mistakes is a great start, it doesn’t obviate the need for practice. 

This is true in my night job as a critical care physician. We, as a medical community “train” on cardiac arrest scenario management every 2 years at a minimum. This is in order to maintain a certification and renew our credentials/privileges at hospitals. This training is valuable and necessary; the science and management of cardiac arrest is ever progressing, and a 2 year interval is appropriate to catch up on new guidelines being published.

Huzzah, training is valuable!

However, a quick perusal of the cardiac arrest outcomes literature shows improvement in institutions that have “mock code” programs, team simulation “training” programs and the like, where teams practice management skills and team work skills at intervals in between the certification training. Training is in the name of these programs in the medical literature, but it is not actually what provides the value. “Team training” is the same as any other training – it shows benefit in the immediate period following the training, but the beneficial effects do not persist, unless they are coupled with regular intervals of practice. We need to stop using “training” and “practice” as interchangeable synonyms. They are 2 steps in the learning process for skills, and we focus on only the beginning, not the follow thru. 

Why do we do this? Training is more easily managed in our minds and executable in our organizational cultures. I can track it on a spreadsheet. I can give out a certificate. I can set an expiration date. I can be “done”.   Logistically, “training” lends itself to be far more attractive to our checklist culture, because it appears as though we can cross it off the list at some point. Practice is ongoing; essentially never-ending. The interval may be adjustable based on volume and expertise, but it never goes away. 

 Has Caitlin Clark noted in any interview that because she can drop bombs from 7 feet behind the 3 point line, that she is “trained” and no longer practices the skill in between games? Did her coach at Iowa just cross off “distance shooting” from the spreadsheet and call it good? I’m presenting you with an intentionally absurd premise to make the point.  In sports it’s obvious. Nobody from the Indiana Fever is going to tell Caitlin Clark, “Jeesh, take a break, you got this”.  Nobody would tell Aaron Judge to skip BP because he hit 62 homeruns in a single season.  And if Clark misses a shot, or Judge strikes out, nobody is going to send them a powerpoint on the basics of hand eye coordination, and award them a certificate of completion after they rapid fire click thru it. 

Practice requires time, space and resources. In a corporate setting that prizes productivity, or a health care organization that prizes throughput, it is difficult to dedicate time, space and salary for an activity that in the immediate term “produces nothing”.  You also need an expert not only of the skill, but of assessing errors and providing corrective feedback. Training is easy…Practice is hard.  Of course in the intermediate and long term, practice does provide for safety, quality, excellence and progress, but recognizing this requires a longer term horizon and a growth mindset. 

Why do we do this? Training is more easily managed in our minds and executable in our organizational cultures. I can track it on a spreadsheet. I can give out a certificate. I can set an expiration date. I can be “done”.

   What are your thoughts? I would love your comments and response below! 

What’s the takeaways?

Don’t substitute a higher volume of training at the expense of practice and expect mastery. Without a healthy balance of both halves, i.e. training to specifically address shortcomings, and practice to achieve mastery, you just aren’t getting where you think you’re getting.

Be on the lookout for how folks in your organization use the terms “training” and “practice”…are they interchangeable synonyms, or are they separate and distinct parts of a complete pursuit of mastery? Does talent get the credit, or is consistent hard work recognized and rewarded?