{"id":1047,"date":"2019-10-21T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-21T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/reports\/is-your-team-a-good-learning-organisation\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T05:12:27","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T05:12:27","slug":"performance-david-epstein-connecting-knowledge-incongruence","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/performance-david-epstein-connecting-knowledge-incongruence\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Your Team a Good Learning Organisation?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\n Oct 21, 2019 <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>Articles<\/a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t

Is Your Team a Good Learning Organisation?<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n \n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Category<\/div>\n Leadership & Culture<\/a> <\/div>\n
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https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/performance-david-epstein-connecting-knowledge-incongruence\/<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/section>\n\n\n
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David Epstein explains that fields as diverse as the military, economics and education are discovering the importance of \u2018connections knowledge\u2019 and \u2018incongruence\u2019 when it comes to talent development.<\/p>\n \n \n \n

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This is Part II of a two-part feature detailing David Epstein’s presentation at the 2019 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Atlanta. For Part I click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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By John Portch<\/h6>\n

Talent identification and development can be a tricky business across sport but David Epstein<\/a> suggests that there are steps teams can take to ensure better learning and knowledge transfer.<\/p>\n

As he told an audience at the 2019 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Atlanta, Epstein, whose 2013 bestselling book The Sports Gene<\/em><\/a> challenged the notion of the \u201810,000-hour rule\u2019 for achieving mastery in elite sport, believes that generalists tend to be better positioned to thrive in their chosen field than early specialists.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a theme he covers in great detail in his latest book Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

His main point of comparison, as discussed in Part I<\/a>, is Roger Federer and Tiger Woods, who both reached the top of their game despite Federer dabbling in a series of sports as an adolescent, which was in stark contrast to Woods, who first picked up a golf club at age two.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy question was: which model was the norm?\u201d says Epstein. \u201cThe Tiger Woods story is the one we know; Roger Federer is every bit as famous but we don\u2019t know his story and it turns out that the Roger pattern is the norm; it\u2019s not ubiquitous but it is the norm across sports.\u201d<\/p>\n

Federer\u2019s mother, says Epstein, was a tennis coach and yet she refused to coach her son due to his reluctance to return the ball in a conventional manner. It may come as a shock to those who have watched in admiration as the Swiss has collected his 20 grand slam titles playing some of the finest tennis ever witnessed.<\/p>\n

Epstein adds: \u201c[The likes of Federer] play a variety of sports whether formally or informally, with lots of unstructured play; they learn these broader skills that scaffold later technical skills; they learn about their interests, they learn about their abilities, and they systematically delay specialising until later than their peers.\u201d<\/p>\n

This sampling period enabled Federer to develop his \u2018connections knowledge\u2019, his ability to apply skills gleaned from a variety of sports to the challenge of winning tennis matches.<\/p>\n

While a teenage Federer may have been less inclined to keep up with his future peers, Epstein makes the point that fields as diverse as the US military and economics are witnessing the value of connections knowledge.<\/p>\n

He also explores the value of \u2018incongruence\u2019 \u2013 an economics term that describes the concept of mixed signals when it comes to process and outcome \u2013 in creating a learning environment that allows talent to develop.<\/p>\n

Connections knowledge at the US Air Force Academy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Epstein tells the audience that his intuition around talent development, which was repeatedly challenged during the researching and writing of Range, was further challenged by a case study around mathematics teaching at the US Air Force Academy.<\/p>\n

He explains that cadets would take a sequence of three courses: calculus one, calculus two and a follow-on course. For the benefit of the decade-long study, professors were randomised each year as students studied cadets and professors to better understand the impact of teaching.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt turned out there was an inverse relationship between how well the students performed in calculus one with how well they performed in calculus two and three,\u201d says Epstein.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor example, one of the professors whose students did best in calculus one \u2013 over-performing, they rated him best \u2013 was dead-last out of 100 in how those students then did in the follow-on courses.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt turned out that the best way to get the best contemporaneous achievement in your own class was for professors to teach a very narrow curriculum that was geared to the test; to impart it using procedures knowledge, where you see a type of problem and execute a certain type of procedure.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not unlike golf, where an early specialist such as Tiger Woods was able to thrive and was winning majors by the age of 20. Golf is what Epstein calls a \u2018kind\u2019 learning environment, where learners have perfect information, operate with clear goals, and experience immediate feedback.<\/p>\n

Other sports, however, and further calculus papers at the US Air Force Academy, are \u2018wicked\u2019 learning environments, which Epstein describes in Range<\/em>: \u201cNot all information is clear. People don\u2019t wait for each other to take turns… Goals may be unclear. Feedback may be intermittent, nonexistent… it may be inaccurate and it may be delayed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wicked learning environments require \u2018connections knowledge\u2019, which is the kind imparted by those calculus professors who taught a broader curriculum.<\/p>\n

\u201c[With connections knowledge] you don\u2019t show the same group of people the same problem twice \u2013 you confuse them,\u201d says Epstein. \u201c[They rated their professors as lower, these students; they rated their learning as less; they did worse on the calculus one exam and they proceeded to over-perform in all their subsequent classes.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaking connections knowledge is the type of knowledge that teaches you to match a type of strategy to a problem instead of how to execute procedures \u2013 and that is exactly what the type of analogical thinking I started with does.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who wins: the early or late specialisers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Epstein reflected on the US Air Force Academy case study and began to focus once more on processes that cause the greatest short-term improvement that can occasionally undermine long-term development.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started looking at education and there was an economist worried about the same thing \u2013 is it better to specialise early or late?\u201d he continues. \u201cHe found a natural experiment in the higher ed environments of England and Scotland; he said the systems are pretty similar except the Scots can keep sampling later than the English students during the time period he was studying.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho wins this trade-off? The early or late specialisers? What he found was that the early specialisers do jump out into an income lead because they have more domain-specific skills, but the later specialisers pick better match quality; they learn about their interests and their abilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Match quality\u2019 is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between your interests and abilities in the work you do, which also has an impact on one\u2019s motivation and performance.<\/p>\n

It also proved relevant at the United States Military Academy at West Point which, during the 1990s, was considered for defunding by the military top brass given its high drop-out rates following the six-week orientation period.<\/p>\n

\u201cA high-ranking army officer suggested defunding West Point because it was an institution that taught its cadets to get out of the army.\u201d<\/p>\n

Epstein was sceptical of that conclusion. \u201cIt turned out that the army\u2019s \u2018up or out\u2019 structure did not keep pace with the expansion of the knowledge economy, which allows more lateral mobility.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt first, the army threw money at some of these high potential officers to get them to stay; and the ones who were going to stay took it and the ones who were going to leave left anyway \u2013 and that was half a billion dollars of taxpayers\u2019 money and it didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd they said, \u2018you know what, we didn\u2019t develop a \u201cgrit\u201d problem overnight \u2013 we developed a match quality problem\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

It led to the solution: \u201cThey started programmes like talent-based branching where instead of saying \u2018here\u2019s your career track, go up or out\u2019 instead they said \u2018we\u2019re going to pair you with a coach, here\u2019s some career tracks, try this one and reflect with your coach\u2019 or \u2018try this one or this other one and keep reflecting until we triangulate a better fit for you\u2019; and they have had better luck with that in retention than throwing money at people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Incongruence and learning<\/strong><\/p>\n

Epstein then turned the focus towards how organisations can be turned into learning operations. He referred to the work of Philip E Tetlock, author of Superforecasting<\/em>, who studied how HR managers learn from their experiences.<\/p>\n

He says: \u201cThese HR managers would be given a procedure to predict how future employees would perform at their company. This was a simulation so they could then see the results; and if they were told subtly beforehand \u2018you\u2019re going to be held accountable for your decision-making process\u2019 then they would stick to the procedure no matter what even if it was clearly erroneous and they could find a much better one.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the other hand, if they were told you\u2019re going to be held accountable for your outcomes, period, then they would deviate from the procedures no matter what, even if they worked really well. So there were errors of mindless conformity and errors of reckless deviance depending on how people felt they were being held accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was not conducive to learning but Tetlock helped to identify the solution. \u201cThe way to balance those errors and make sure that people learnt from each procedure was to take the people who felt like they were being held accountable for process only and to give them fake research from Harvard that said successful teams prize independence of thought and speaking up and sometimes improvising and suddenly they learn from every experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey would conform when it made sense and deviate when it made sense. For the people who felt they were only held accountable for their outcomes, they were given fake research that said successful teams prize cohesion and consensus and following tradition; and those people then started learning from every instance and getting better and better and more accurate; where they would deviate where they thought it was best and sometimes rely on the old procedures.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Epstein explains: \u201cThis is called incongruence; when you have mixed cultural signals about outcome and process accountability.<\/p>\n

\u201cBusiness students in the world are widely taught that congruence is critical to a well-functioning organisation; everything in the culture should align in one direction; and it turns out that this does make people feel more comfortable with their culture and they feel better able to define their culture but they actually learn more slowly; and in harnessing incongruence there is a mix of outcome and accountability it causes people to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Epstein concluded his presentation with reference to Brad Sheehan<\/a>, the Managing Director of Flight Safety at Delta Air Lines, who spoke at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium the previous day.<\/p>\n

\u201cYesterday, when Brad said safety first, clients second, what he is doing is taking a highly process-accountable industry and saying \u2018by the way, your outcome is really important first\u2019 \u2013 he\u2019s perfectly mixing process outcome and accountability and that\u2019s how you make a learning organisation into a learning organisation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/div>\n \n \n \n <\/div>\n

\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Epstein explains that fields as diverse as the military, economics and education are discovering the importance of \u2018connections knowledge\u2019 and \u2018incongruence\u2019 when it comes to talent development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1048,"menu_order":0,"template":"","categories":[20],"pathway":[],"topic":[],"sport":[],"class_list":["post-1047","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-leadership-culture-performance"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIs Your Team a Good Learning Organisation? - Performance Institute<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/performance-david-epstein-connecting-knowledge-incongruence\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is Your Team a Good Learning Organisation? 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