Research on doctors shows that even those who have been in practice for 20 or 30 years do worse on objective measures of performance than doctors who are just 2 or 3 years out of med school.
Harvard Medical School published a study in 2005 on 62 different individual research reports on the standard of care provided by doctors and how it changes over time. Almost three-quarters of the studies found a doctor’s quality of care declines over time. Older doctors knew less and performed worse in terms of providing care than those who had fewer years of experience. Just 2 of the 62 studies found doctors got better with more years of service.
The assumption that med school, reading medical journals, and attending seminars when combined with years of experience should be enough to improve their skills doesn’t seem to hold for many doctors.1
The problem, as outlined by Anders Ericcson in his excellent book
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson, is the difference between knowledge and skills:
This distinction between knowledge and skills lies at the heart of the difference between traditional paths toward expertise and the deliberate-practice approach. Traditionally, the focus is nearly always on knowledge. Even when the ultimate outcome is being able to do something—solve a particular type of math problem, say, or write a good essay—the traditional approach has been to provide information about the right way to proceed and then mostly rely on the student to apply that knowledge. Deliberate practice, by contrast, focuses solely on performance and how to improve it.
When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business worlds, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills. The main reasons are tradition and convenience: it is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice.
Knowledge is table stakes.
Mindless repetition isn’t going to improve your results.
Developing useful skills requires going outside of your comfort zone and determining a clear plan of attack for getting better.
Knowledge vs. Skill
