PROCESS POST: Creativity and Practice

What’s the difference between creative work and deliberate practice?

Creative work means fighting The Resistance. (See Steven Pressfield).

Creative work is a process of balancing thinking with no-mind (highly aware, alert, and present, but no inner voice stream):

The surprising result of a nation-wide inquiry among America’s most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking “plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself.”

–The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.

Creative work means being the ‘sub-creator.’ As Tolkien put it:

What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ’sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter.

Deliberate Practice is all about working on a skill to improve performance.

Deliberate Practice is not the performance itself, but the hard effort of making one’s performance better.

Deliberate Practice requires intense mental effort. It requires concentration. Does it require thinking? Or does it simply require intense mental focus (alert present awareness, but no internal voice jabbering away)?

The entertainment industry is huge. The defense industry is huge. The (blank) industry is huge. There’s a lot of creativity there and deliberate practice. We can encourage and support young people to be expert creative-types through well-designed educative experiences, but is it all to serve the wealth of shareholders?

I believe that we can develop and apply our creative skills to design thinking: designing for change. 

PROCESS POST: Expert Performance Approach

What if someone was in a sewing apprenticeship and focusing on costume design?

Two skills to develop: costume design and sewing because the young person wants to design, but the apprentice would have to be a highly skilled at sewing in order to create satisfactory prototypes.

So in terms of Deliberate Practice (DP), you would probably need some kind of objective reference point for each skill. These benchmarks would possibly rate the ability of a beginner, novice, and expert. The rating would be based on the objective skill of an expert’s performance.

So then you would be measuring the skill level in sewing and costume design based on expert performance. The measurements would be taken from actual performance of the task or on the finished product.

What you would need would be some way to objectively test your abilities against that of an expert (the expert’s work would be what you compare your work to–but how?). And then identify your weaknesses and then spend all your time challenging yourself in solitary work to overcome those weaknesses (I think the apprentice’s mentor would have to be the one pointing out weaknesses that need improvement).

One would use the teachings of an expert coach. That expert MUST have intimate knowledge with the most effective ways to increase skill. For example, a chess teacher would be intimately familiar with all the training exercises to get better at different aspects of chess. Same goes for any sport and musical instrument. Same goes for any technical skill. The expert coach must utilize this domain knowledge to DESIGN the most effective and most efficient training program to get better at that skill (but the most effective training programs have already been designed in music lessons, sports, weight lifting, so what about achieving expert performance in fashion design?). That design would differ from field to field. But the principles of DP would all be in effect. I need to know more details about how to do DP.

I need to know how you identify expert performance in a given skill. Is it something a layperson can identify?

Can a layperson codify the factors of expert performance (say, in fashion design)?

I need to know how you can measure progress towards expert performance. Is it something a layperson can do?

I need to know how to design the optimal training experience for acquiring expert performance in a given skill. While this probably isn’t possible, what I can do is create a system or structure for mentors to utilize. With that template, the mentors can design the optimal training experience for their apprentices in a community of practice.

What is the Expert Performance Approach?

What can I find on google under deliberate practice in fashion design? Nill.

What can I find on google under deliberate practice in sewing? Zippo.

“Measurable performance in representative activities that capture expertise in the associated domain”

“factors that promote the acquisition and development of superior professional performance”

“expert performance approach (Ericssion & Lehmann, 1996; Ericsson & Smith, 1991)” This is the approach to measuring expert performance as developed by Ericsson. “This approach focuses on objectively measurable superior performance on representative tasks that capture expertise in the domain.”

For skills like sewing or fashion design, I imagine one could design an apprenticeship (a training program) to “promote the acquisition and development of superior professional performance.” The question is, how?

I’m curious about other fields such as Design Thinking. Say, for example, a young person wanted to have an apprenticeship at Unboundary with Bo Adams in applying Design Thinking to Education. In this scenario, is it possible to design a training program that would detail “Measurable performance in representative activities that capture expertise in the associated domain?” Are there some fields of activity that defy measuring expert performance?

–all quotes taken from Development of Professional Expertise, Ed. by K. Anders Ericsson

PROCESS POST: Belonging, Contribution, and Identity

THIS IS A PROCESS POST. HT TO BO ADAMS FOR SHARING THIS KIND OF POST WITH ME. THIS IS A POST WRITTEN FOR MY BENEFIT IT ORDER TO PROCESS MY THINKING ON A CONCEPT.

Situated Learning, pages 111 and 115:

Notions like those of “intrinsic rewards” in empirical studies of apprenticeship focus quite narrowly on task knowledge and skill as the activities to be learned. Such knowledge is of course important; but a deeper sense of the value of participation to the community  and the learner lies in becoming part of the community.

What comes to mind is the Needs Inventory from The Center for Nonviolent Communication. The Inventory suggests that all human beings of all ages share the same basic needs and one of those needs is for Contribution and another need is for Belonging. Apprenticeship, legitimate peripheral participation, and deliberate practice in a community of practice would all be powerful ways for individuals (especially young people) to get those universal human needs met. When we get our needs met, we feel good.

Moving toward full participation in practice involves not just a greater commitment of time, intensified effort, more and broader responsibilities within the community [of practice], and more difficult and risky tasks, but, more significantly, an increasing sense of identity as a master practitioner.

We have claimed that the development of identity is central to the careers of newcomers in communities of practice, and thus fundamental to the concept of legitimate peripheral participation.

In fact, we have argued that, from the perspective we have developed here, learning and a sense of identity are inseparable: They are aspects of the same phenomenon.

Biological Reason

A biological reason to engage in apprenticeship instead of school:

Myelin [is] the substance that wraps slowly around neurons with practice [of some skill], insulating and strengthening key connections in the brain. Practice in childhood causes myelin to build up more than does practice in adulthood. A study of professional pianists found that the more practice they did before age sixteen, the more myelin they had in the critical parts of their brains. Starting early holds advantages that become less available later in life.

–Talent is Overrated, page 171

So if you are starting an apprenticeship in a skill or craft or activity instead of school, then you would be maximizing your biology to gain benefits in the long run. The more hours you practice the skill or activity as a youth, then the greater advantage you would have biologically, not to mention the huge head-start from the learning accumulated in all those hours as a practitioner.

PROCESS POST: Then and Now

This is a process post intended for me to process my thoughts on a specific topic.

You could start teaching basic domain knowledge—the facts of a specific business—and of course this was done routinely for centuries until fairly recently. Kids started learning the family business or some other business before age ten. We can appreciate the wisdom of the apprenticeship system, which immersed people in a particular field under a skilled teacher’s direction from a young age.

Developed countries don’t use the apprenticeship system anymore because in the nineteenth century the nature of work changed…. [T]he industrial revolution made farming more efficient…and sparked the growth of factories which needed more people….[T]owns nationwide decided that every student should complete twelve years of schooling. At first this was job training.

–Talent is Overrated, page 176

As we know, school was created to produce efficient workers for the factory. Colvin omits  here that the nature of work has changed again in the last few decades, although he does recognize it elsewhere in the book when he mentions A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink.

I admire Colvin’s valuing of a well-designed apprenticeship, but I’m disheartened by his summary of why contemporary schooling and college is still valid:

Your work and daily life might never require you to know Homer or Shakespeare or the history of Russia, or, for that matter, trigonometry or chemistry. But there’s more to life than work, and knowing these things enriches your life and makes you a more fulfilled person.

–Talent is Overrated, page 178

Excuse me? Who is to judge what makes someone else fulfilled? Who can determine what enriches everyone’s life?

Solution

I believe that young people need to choose a skill, a craft, a knowledge-domain, or a field of activity and then engage in an apprenticeship with an expert while utilizing the principles of Deliberate Practice. It’s essential that the young person makes the decision. Anxiety and depression result if young people feel that they don’t have control over their lives.

I believe this needs to be the new approach to education that is done instead of schooling. It’s a solution that I think would work.

I believe that the apprenticeship should be purposefully and specifically designed to take full advantage of Legitimate Peripheral Participation within a Community of Practice. I believe the young person must be surrounded with other deliberate practitioners of all skill levels in order to learn from their mistakes and successes. The apprenticeship must be designed to adhere to the principles of Deliberate Practice, researched and codified by Anders Ericsson.

Anders Ericsson (author of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance) and others have spent years documenting and codifying the principles of optimum learning experiences in order to achieve expert performance. Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn, suggests that authentic, deep learning is so complex that it can’t be measured. That may be true at this point. But performance can be measured and I think the work of Ericsson and other independent researchers have proven how to measure performance in order to yield expert-level ability in any field.

PROCESS POST: Apprenticeship in Your Element

I wrote this post in order to process my thinking about something, so I call this a Process Post. It’s intended primarily for my own benefit.

I think you can apply the Deliberate Practice (DP) method to apprenticeships. The downside of that is that it is not fun. DP is not inherently enjoyable. It requires a high degree of commitment to a goal in order to stick with it. But if the apprenticeship is completely self-chosen, then it’s probably the right thing for that individual.

In high school, I was really into comics, sci-fi, and illustration. So if I had an apprenticeship (that was founded on principles of DP) in comic book writing and illustrating and I developed that skill in order to produce a really high-quality comic and get it published, then it would be really worth it to me. The hours working on hard, challenging aspects of the craft would be done in order to serve a higher goal.

In The Pathfinder, Nicholas Lore asks readers to think about your element, but in different language. He calls it your function. Your function is what you would do if someone could wind you up like a toy and let you go. What would you do? I believe that your function(s) and doing stuff in your element are actually one and the same.

If you know your play-type, then you know when you’re in your Element (I capitalize it to remind myself of the book by Sir Ken Robinson). You get in a flow state. Time flies. That’s when you’re doing your function. So if you can commit yourself to a huge goal in the sphere of your Element, then you utilize DP to realize that goal, then your play (performance in any arena/ field/ domain) becomes far more effective than it would be otherwise and it increases the value of what you contribute to the world.