Training Lessons from Sports: Cue & Pattern Recognition

 The amateur watching a soccer game sees a swirl of activity, a seeming chaos of players darting back and forth. In contrast, the expert immediately recognizes patterns and detects small irregularities.  Ditto football. To the uninitiated a running play is a confusing pile of players.  The expert detects minor changes in blocking and defensive schemes that amount to big advantages.  

As the psychologist and performance researcher, Anders Ericsson points out: "A hallmark of expert performance is the ability to see patterns in a collection of things that would seem random or confusing to people with less well developed mental representations.” 

Why does this matter?  As physical ability levels out, cognitive abilities—such as pattern recognition skills—play a greater and greater role in sports.  At the lower levels of competition, physical ability and rudimentary differences in skills matter more. As players advance to higher levels of competition, the differentiators lie in more refined elements. And at the upper echelons these differentiators are almost entirely in the cognitive realm. (This holds in any pursuit —football, carpentry, medicine, mandolin…)  All NFL defensive backs are strong and fast.  Within this elite grouping, strength and speed alone tell you little about a player's relative performance. The good ones have a more refined ability to read situations and detect patterns. The greats have ingrained this ability so as to act on an almost instinctive level. 

Staying with the football example, think about how quarterbacks prepare. They study film, watching and analyzing play—and then go to the field and practice against similar defensive configurations. Effectively, they're developing cue & pattern recognition skills. Making the right decision a fraction of a second faster can mean the difference between a great play and a disastrous one. 

This same phenomenon applies in the corporate world, especially in professional interactions such as sales meetings, negotiations, and customer service encounters.  Experts can detect cues and recognize patterns that go undetected by less experienced people.  And, as in football, quick cues and small changes can amount to big swings in performance.  

We have innumerable options to train people in communication and interaction skills. Most of these, however, are what learning & development (L&D) experts call “weak” methods—methods designed to apply across a span of situations.  Such methods have an advantage in that from the trainer's perspective  they're efficient. With little or no adaptation trainers can provide the instruction to a range of employees, using a range of delivery options — books, manuals, e-courses, webinars, classroom training.  Yet, such methods alone rarely work because they fail to address the specific situational and contextual factors—the small nuances—that make all the difference when you’re in a real-life encounter.  

One of the hidden scandals in the L&D world is that performance in corporate training is a poor predictor of on-the-job performance.  (Let that sink in for a second!)  What explains this?  Part of it is simply that what’s addressed in formal training is the easy part, leaving the employee to master the more critical, harder parts on their own. For example, the general constructs used to train sales or customer service are usually pretty straightforward, in fact, most of them are ridiculously simple.  Anyone can learn, say, the 5 stages of a sales process and some phrasing to advance a sale with a willing buyer.  What’s harder is knowing when to do so —detecting the signals that indicate the buyer is in fact willing.  After all, buyers don’t announce “This is a buying signal” or “I’m about to put forth an objection.”  Detecting those cues in the throes of the back-and-forth customer exchange takes a degree of specialized expertise.  

In short, learning the general model is easy, mastering the specific situations is hard. 

I don’t want to overstate it—it’s not rocket science. But cue & pattern recognition is a critical driver of performance; it’s a skill; and like any skill it’s developed only through study and hands-on practice.  Absent those offline activities, employees have to rely on real-life experience to get through the learning curve. That can take a long time and comes with a cost.  

In sports, coaches use video, collected best practices & written analysis, computer simulations, and targeted re-enactment drills in practice to help players along this development cycle. On the corporate agenda, we need to adopt a similar approach—equally deliberate, determined, and methodical—to training cue & pattern recognition. 

The Knowledge Inversion Problem

 People often learn things in one order but encounter them in another order.  This is called knowledge-inversion. For example, medical students learn about a bodily function, then about ailments in that function, and then about the symptoms associated with those ailments.  However, when they meet with patients they encounter this information in the reverse order.  The patient starts talking about symptoms.  The doctor must then try to associate a given ailment or disease. 

In short, in school, the information flow is "Given ailment X, you'll see symptoms, A, B, C."  In practice, the flow is "Given symptoms A, B, C.… the patient might be suffering from ailment X."   On paper, this seems like a minor difference. In real life, it can result in enormous complications. 

This knowledge inversion challenge appears time and again in professional settings.  Many occupations call for a similar diagnostic process.  For instance what customer service reps, or car mechanics, or consultants, or technical support professionals do is similar to the doctor's diagnosis exercise.  They listen to customers present issues (symptoms) and try to ascertain the source problem (ailments).  (And then, ideally, prescribe a solution.)

The medical profession has overcome this challenge through variations of experiential learning, in particular through the use of the case-study.  A case-study captures a representative scenario, in which learners wade through noise in order to identify, extract, and analyze the meaningful points of information.  The process can be messy, inexact,  and tainted by biases, and the resulting conclusions are often subject to fierce debate.  Which is perfect -- because so goes life.  Think about how often patients receive drastically different feedback when they seek second opinions.

As workplace encounters become more complex and employee development time more precious, organization professionals will need to work in variations of case-study training and other aspects of experiential learning.  Here, we can draw an instructive parallel from medical communications training. 

Medical physician has been a profession for thousands of years, as far back as documented history takes us.  And medicine has been a formal study for centuries.  Yet, it's only in recent decades that educators zoomed in on the medical interview --the initial discussions between patient and doctor--as a target of formal communications training.   As the medical field became increasingly complex, they found that this brief encounter became increasingly more critical.  Obviously, an incorrect or missed diagnosis can be a problem, but, there's more at stake.  This encounter also serves to frame the doctor-patient relationship, helps assure the patient of competence, and even determines whether the patient will adhere to the ultimate recommendations.

That brief discussion--usually no more than 2-3 minutes, sometimes as quick as 30-45 seconds--drives the patients' health outcomes and shapes the reputation of the doctor and the institution.  Do it well, and things go well.  Miss a step…. and the physician's years of study and the institution's vast technological, pharmaceutical, and other applied resources are rendered useless.  As the saying goes, the chain is only as strong as the weakest link. 

An advantage the medical field has is that by now this communications training process has matured.  Specifically, the knowledge-base is well-documented and systematically reviewed, analyzed, and updated.  In contrast, in most work-place domains, we're in virgin territory.  Very little is encoded.  On average, an established firm will codify 10-20% of the facts and heuristics used in everyday business.  And that's being generous. The only reason it's even that high is because of rapid technology adoption in recent years.  Firms have been forced to document more knowledge in the process of implementing new systems. 

The knowledge exists of course.  And firms do send out employees to handle tricky encounters every day.  Yet while this knowledge exists at the institutional level, that doesn't mean it's captured and circulated.  That is the info exists in the minds of executives and seasoned staff, but is rarely documented and converted to training tools. 

Training professionals will have to help overcome this problem.  As business solutions become richer, more complex, and more infused with technology, the human interaction--the interface between the firm's solution and the customer--invariably becomes more pivotal.  In order to work with and understand and improve and analyze these encounters we have to have the home-spun wisdom captured.  Importantly, if we want to leverage technology, we have to capture and act on this information.