I use the word practice a lot.
I'm not talking about habits. I'm not talking about productivity. And I'm not talking about optimizing every part of your day.
I mean something much simpler: Practice is repeated engagement with something that changes what you're able to recognize, understand, and do.
This is important because….
Knowing Isn't the Same as Being Able to Do
Think about public speaking.
I can give someone a list of everything we know about giving a good presentation:
Make eye contact. Know your audience. Use stories. Slow down. Don't overcrowd your slides. Rehearse.
The information isn't particularly difficult to find. But knowing those things doesn't make you a good speaker.
You have to stand in front of people. Lose your place. Speak too quickly. Notice the audience getting confused.
Try again.
Eventually, something changes. You stop merely knowing that you should slow down. You begin to feel when you're speaking too quickly. That's practice.
The knowledge has moved from information to capability.
This Happens Everywhere
I've seen the same problem in teaching, advising, interviewing, and organizations.
The information exists. The policy exists. The training exists. The instructions exist.
Someone sent the email. Everyone technically has access to what they need to know.
And people still don't know what to do.
That's because communication hasn't succeeded simply because information was transmitted.
The more useful question is: What would someone need to practice before this knowledge became usable?
If you're teaching interviewing, people need to practice asking questions and responding to unexpected answers.
If you're teaching communication, people need opportunities to misunderstand each other, repair the misunderstanding, and try again.
If you're introducing a new process at work, people need to encounter the process in situations that resemble the ones where they'll actually use it.
Information can tell us what to do. Practice helps us become capable of doing it.
Practice Changes Recognition
There's another layer to this. Practice doesn't only change our actions. It changes what we can see.
An experienced teacher notices things in a classroom that a new teacher may miss.
An experienced interviewer hears something in an answer that creates the next question.
Someone who understands an organization's systems recognizes a problem that looks completely ordinary to everyone else.
The environment hasn't necessarily changed. The person who is practising has changed.
Repeated engagement has created new distinctions. New questions. New judgment. New possibilities for action.
That's why I don't think the central challenge for learning is simply: How do we give people more information?
I'm increasingly interested in another question:
Where is important knowledge failing to become clear communication and effective action?
Sometimes the answer is a better explanation.
But sometimes the answer is practice. People need somewhere to try. Somewhere to make mistakes. Somewhere to receive feedback. Somewhere to reflect. And somewhere to try again.
Reflection
What are you practicing every day, intentionally or unintentionally?
Not just what are you doing repeatedly.
Ask yourself: What is that repetition teaching you to notice? What is it making you better at? Who are you becoming through it?
Because whether we design our practices or not, repetition is always teaching us something. The question is whether it's teaching us what we actually want to learn.
Until next time,
Greg K. Campbell