[Neurons] 2024 Neurons #47 REVERSING FAILIURE DOES NOT EQUAL EXPERTISE

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2024 Neurons #47

October 28, 2024

A Deep Dive Into Expertise #4

 

 

REVERSING FAILURE

DOES NOT EQUAL EXPERTISE

 

 

"You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure.  Of all
the infinite number of ways to perform a certain task, most of them are
wrong.  There are only a few right ways.  Excellence is not the opposite of
failure.  It is just different.  It has its own configuration."  First,
Break all the Rules.  Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.

 

This quotation reflects the very premise which we use in NLP.  Namely, that
when you want to develop models of excellence, it will do you no good to
study what is broken, flawed, or dysfunctional.  Bandler compared that
approach to visiting a junkyard and studying broken and crashed cars if your
outcome is to design and build the next generation of new cars.   If you
study the cars in a junkyard and how they broke down, or were destroyed, and
then try to reverse what went wrong, that is not likely to enable you to
create an excellent car.  The same is true of dysfunctional families,
individuals, and organizations -studying them will not give you the pathway
to excellence.

 

Buckingham and Coffman suggest that there's not that much we can learn about
excellence from failure because there's so many ways to fail, and only a few
ways to succeed.  To succeed at doing something with excellence, and
developing expertise requires being willing to identify the required factors
and then working with those variables in a focused way.  The first key is to
identify what's necessary and sufficient.  And those factors may be the ones
especially missing in the junkyard.

 

What this means for you, if you want to pursue expertise, is that when you
know the required factors, stop chasing options.  For people who are
option-oriented, this can be challenging and at first unpleasant.  What
happens when a person is always trying to find yet another way, another
alternative, etc. to doing what you know are true and tested ways?  You get
distracted and lose the intensity of focus which you need to develop
excellence in what you are doing.

 

The authors also say something else important about excellence, namely
expertise has its own configuration.  It has its own structure or form.
Often that's what is discovered and what creates a paradigm shift in a
field.  Someone thinks outside of the box and comes up with something that
no one had ever thought of before.  How do we find such variables?   This is
where brainstorming comes in, reading outside of the field, asking, "What am
I missing?"  "What else could be there but is not?"

 

Excellence is almost never about fixing what has not worked or what barely
worked.   Excellence is not a remedial type of experience.  Instead it is
generative by nature and arises from thinking anew about an area, often
re-thinking the assumptions and premises that have led to the previous
failures.   Not infrequently what goes wrong and causes failure goes to the
fact that the previous actions were based on false premises.

 

When you study failure, you will mostly learn excellent ways to fail.  You
might also learn about the variables that make someting go wrong.  At best,
you will learn about the factors that need to be fixed or repaired.
Ironically a great deal of "problem-solving" among individuals and in
organizations is entirely problem-focused.  It is directed to identifying
and correcting the problem, or identifying the persons involved, it is
remedial in nature.  It is not focused on excellence-on a superior product,
service, or methodology.

 

The solution to trying to study failure and then reverse it to identify
excellence is to move away from a problem focus in the first place and adopt
a solution focus.  It is to focus on your desired outcome and what
excellence mean in terms of that outcome.  And that's why we look to experts
and Carl Rogers' "fully functioning persons" as exemplars who we want to
model.

 

 

For more

              Thinking Like a Modeler (2018)

              Deep Dive into Expertise (2022)

                             https://www.neurosemantics.com/shop/page/8/ 

                             https://www.neurosemantics.com/products/ 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

meta at acsol.net

 

 



 

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