Streetlights and Shadows by Gary Klein

Author:Gary Klein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

When I first watched Jimmy, I realized that he was having trouble anticipating the trajectory of the ball, especially when it came off of corners. He dreaded serves to his backhand, and he lunged for the ball as soon as it came near him even though it was a tough shot to make, because he didn’t want to wait for it to angle off the back wall. Continued practice wasn’t going to help Jimmy, because he wasn’t giving himself a chance to learn how the ball bounced off the walls. He wasn’t giving himself a chance to get feedback. That’s why I wanted him to simply watch the ball. By the time he asked permission to swing, he was eager to hit the ball instead of dreading it.

Unfortunately, the story had a sad ending. When Jimmy returned home and resumed his racquetball games with his girlfriend, he discovered that now he had a better backhand than she did. He began to win regularly. Soon after, they broke up. I guess that provides some feedback as well.

So far I have been describing the difficulties we have in learning from feedback in complex situations. Another difficulty is in giving feedback, particularly about subtle cues and tacit knowledge.

It is hard to provide feedback.

It is particularly hard to give feedback on tacit knowledge. If I’m trying to coach you, and want to build up your expertise, how can I give you feedback about the accuracy of your mental models, or about your ability to notice subtle cues, or about your ability to sense what is typical and what is unusual? I’m not likely to even notice these kinds of knowledge. Even if I do give you feedback, you probably won’t know what I’m talking about. Notice that I never told Jimmy anything. I never made any suggestions to him, or gave him any feedback. All I did was arrange for him to see the way the ball was bouncing.

Aside from the difficulty of giving feedback about tacit knowledge, instructors who give us rapid and accurate feedback can actually interfere with our learning. Schmidt and Wulf (1997) found that continuous, concurrent feedback does increase our learning curve while we are being trained but that it reduces any performance gains once the training is over. The reason is that we never have to learn how to get and interpret our own feedback as long as the instructor is doing all that work. The performance goes up nicely in the training environment, but then we are at a loss once we move into our work environment. We would be better off struggling to get our own feedback than having it spoon-fed to us by the instructors. The Schmidt-Wulf research involved motor skills rather than cognitive skills, but I suspect that there are times when aggressive feedback gets in the way of learning cognitive skills.

Consider the way we would want someone to coach us to become a better cook. Rapid feedback from a coach (e.g., “no, add more

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