Deliberate Practice

The ROI of effectively learning as a team

Deliberate Practice  

Practice doesn’t make perfect! Perfect practice makes perfect.

Professional athletes and musicians focus on practicing to get better so that the quality of their work becomes effortless. Why aren’t you and your team practicing to get better?

Applying the concepts of Learned Behaviorism, using the techniques of Deliberate Practice, and simple “tools” like Code Katas can result in a more knowledgeable team that produces higher-quality code at a more rapid pace.

In this talk, I lay out the concepts of Deliberate Practice and Learning-Performance Distinction. You’ll learn how to facilitate learning opportunities to ensure the best outcomes, and I’ll give you examples of practices that I have done (and continue to do) at companies that teach Deliberate Practice, and the positive outcomes that we achieved. Attendees will get to participate in a simple, but effective example of practices they can start with their teams immediately.

Learning Outcomes  

• Understand the concepts of Deliberate Practice and Learning-Performance Distinction.
• Learn how to effectively practice with tools like Code Katas and Sparrow Decks
• Understand the outcomes that learning as a group will bring to the team, and how to expand those outcomes to more than just developers.

Presentation Dates  

Resources  

• Slide deck  - updated 2023-04-19

Links  

Llewellyn Falco’s Sparrow Decks 

• Youtube talk on Sparrow Decks

FizzBuzz  Kata
Gilded Rose  Kata
Kata Rules  from Katanation.com

Conway’s Game of Life  rules

Books  

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise  - K. Anders Ericsson
Thinking, Fast and Slow  - Daneil Kahneman
Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us  - Daniel Pink