Deliberate Practice for Thinking Skills

It is easy to imagine using deliberate practice to improve your skills in sports, music, technical occupations, or even in observable leadership skills like listening or giving feedback, but what about thinking skills? Effective leadership is about analysis, judgment, decision-making and other cognitive functions. Can you use deliberate practice to improve these aspects of leadership?

The United States Army would say yes. They have used deliberate practice techniques to teach leaders adaptive thinking skills. They define adaptive thinking as the ability to respond effectively under complex and rapidly changing conditions when a multitude of events compete for the leader’s attention. Traditional training techniques are not very effective in teaching this skill because traditional training teaches processes and techniques but does not teach someone how to recognize which technique is appropriate for a particular situation.

The Army’s Think Like a Commander (TLAC) program is designed to teach officers how to recognize indicators that should be considered in making a decision regarding combat operations and tactics. The results of the training program are impressive. People trained showed a 700% improvement from the beginning of the training to the end in speed and accuracy of identifying critical indicators. Not only did the trainees’ performance during training improve, but those who were trained on the TLAC program outperformed, in some cases, experienced officers who had already been deployed to combat situations.