Deliberate performance: Accelerating expertise in natural settings

Abstract

Deliberate practice, the established method for accelerating expertise through coached, off-line drill, is largely impractical for working professionals due to time constraints and the knowledge-based nature of many occupations. Expertise, often characterized by intuitive decision-making and tacit knowledge, typically relies on years of extensive domain experience. To accelerate this development, deliberate performance is introduced as a strategy where learning activities are integrated into routine work. Deliberate performance aims to systematically build situation awareness and intuitive expertise by guiding the learning process online. The framework proposes four specific cognitive exercises that can be superimposed on daily tasks: estimation (predicting outcomes and resources), experimentation (testing variations in strategy), extrapolation (analyzing near-misses and prior incidents to extract lessons), and explanation (interpreting feedback to diagnose performance). These exercises provide the essential conditions for skill acquisition—repetition, timely feedback, task variety, and progressive difficulty—allowing individuals to self-coach and rapidly transition from journeyman competence to domain mastery. – AI-generated abstract.