John Kay has an article on decision-making in the FT (may vanish behind a paywall soon). This bit caught my eye:
Psychologist Gary Klein has studied the expertise of people with exceptional practical skills. One of his experiments involved showing videos of paramedics in action – some novice, some expert – to various observers. He discovered that both experienced paramedics and lay people were more successful at distinguishing the novices from the professionals than were teachers of paramedic skills. The teachers monitored adherence to the rules they taught and saw such adherence more often in the novices. Lay people by contrast, didn’t know or care whether the practitioners were following the rules or not – they just valued results. And they saw results most often in people who had been well trained, had reinforced that training through experience and who stood out for their expertise.
There’s a warning there for trainers of all kinds.
PS I see the FT is still pasting this insane boilerplate to its journalism: ” You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.” Jeez.
