BY CURT BERGMANN – SR. DATA SCIENTIST
Experience alone does not guarantee excellence. That is the conclusion of a study in 2005 which compared patient outcomes for doctors with a broad range of experience. They found that, in many cases, a doctor’s patient outcomes got worse for those who had been working for many years.
I came across this study while reading Peak by Anders Ericsson, an excellent book about developing skills via practicing. It reminded me of Elicit’s own methods for developing the collective skillsets that help revolutionize our clients’ marketing and customer experience practices:
- We hire people who have already developed skills that enhance our capabilities
- We develop ourselves continuously and challenge each other to improve
We discussed hiring in our blog post titled Hiring for the Long Haul, so I’d like to focus on development, which we like to think of in three phases:
- Discovering new ideas/skills and applications for existing skills
- Taking these discoveries deeper by continuously learning more about them
- Practicing these skills in order to perform them at the highest levels
Elicit takes each of these phases seriously and we enjoy doing it.
DISCOVERING NEW IDEAS
In our blog post, Come On, Brain, we touch on the social impact of our company retreats. These retreats—fun as they are—also feed our discovery engine. Every Elicit team member prepares classes, presentations, and interactive workshops to share what we have learned since the last retreat. We leave energized to delve further into these discoveries and find new ways to apply them.
DEEPER KNOWLEDGE
Part of the requirements for each presenter is to collate and document their bibliographies and resources, which allows the rest of us to dig deeper to understand the details such that we can apply them to the next opportunity.
PRACTICE
But, as I said in the opening sentence, experience alone does not guarantee success. After all, the doctors in the study surely attended continuing education opportunities throughout their careers. But these were mostly geared toward discovery and learning. Practice was the missing step.
Our goal is not to practice on client work. We expect to have practiced our skills many times before working on a client project. In our blog post, After Hours, we describe our regular evening gatherings to discuss ongoing work. These sessions go beyond discussion: team members, who often are not even working on the same project, will huddle—computer displays lighting faces—while they work together to help solve each other’s problems. These are shared practice sessions.
We also have internal classes designed to highlight the unique methods we use. These classes first walk the scholar through an existing example, allowing them to apply new skills as they go. But, more importantly, each class is required to have one or more new examples afterwards, allowing the scholar to practice these skills anew with fresh data.
Our team also practices data science problems when we aren’t at work. We reproduce exercise problems from the latest books we’ve been studying, create credit default models in the personal lending space, develop genetic algorithms to optimize musical instrument fingering, display visual graphing ideas we’ve developed, and of course, we mine historical NFL data to optimize our fantasy football lineups. While none of these may be directly applied to customer analytics, they all share the fundamentals of data analysis, data munging, statistical and machine learning model development, and, just as crucial, the interpretation of their discovered outcomes: fundamental skills that prepare us for excellence at work.
CONCLUSION
What I like best about this approach to skill development is that we aren’t doing this because it will help us to get ahead in business. Instead, each of us thrives on new experiences and takes pleasure in developing and applying our new skills. We love the feeling of flow as we apply these skills on new projects. In Charles Duhigg’s latest book, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, he describes a study where the most productive employees were more likely to be engaged in early stage projects that required them to think. This type of thinking is our bread and butter.
And we eat voraciously.
The Elicit Scholar
BY CURT BERGMANN – SR. DATA SCIENTIST
Experience alone does not guarantee excellence. That is the conclusion of a study in 2005[1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15710959 which compared patient outcomes for doctors with a broad range of experience. They found that, in many cases, a doctor’s patient outcomes got worse for those who had been working for many years.
I came across this study while reading Peak by Anders Ericsson, an excellent book about developing skills via practicing. It reminded me of Elicit’s own methods for developing the collective skillsets that help revolutionize our clients’ marketing and customer experience practices:
We discussed hiring in our blog post titled Hiring for the Long Haul, so I’d like to focus on development, which we like to think of in three phases:
Elicit takes each of these phases seriously and we enjoy doing it.
DISCOVERING NEW IDEAS
In our blog post, Come On, Brain, we touch on the social impact of our company retreats. These retreats—fun as they are—also feed our discovery engine. Every Elicit team member prepares classes, presentations, and interactive workshops to share what we have learned since the last retreat. We leave energized to delve further into these discoveries and find new ways to apply them.
DEEPER KNOWLEDGE
Part of the requirements for each presenter is to collate and document their bibliographies and resources, which allows the rest of us to dig deeper to understand the details such that we can apply them to the next opportunity.
PRACTICE
But, as I said in the opening sentence, experience alone does not guarantee success. After all, the doctors in the study surely attended continuing education opportunities throughout their careers. But these were mostly geared toward discovery and learning. Practice was the missing step.
Our goal is not to practice on client work. We expect to have practiced our skills many times before working on a client project. In our blog post, After Hours, we describe our regular evening gatherings to discuss ongoing work. These sessions go beyond discussion: team members, who often are not even working on the same project, will huddle—computer displays lighting faces—while they work together to help solve each other’s problems. These are shared practice sessions.
We also have internal classes designed to highlight the unique methods we use. These classes first walk the scholar through an existing example, allowing them to apply new skills as they go. But, more importantly, each class is required to have one or more new examples afterwards, allowing the scholar to practice these skills anew with fresh data.
Our team also practices data science problems when we aren’t at work. We reproduce exercise problems from the latest books we’ve been studying, create credit default models in the personal lending space, develop genetic algorithms to optimize musical instrument fingering, display visual graphing ideas we’ve developed, and of course, we mine historical NFL data to optimize our fantasy football lineups. While none of these may be directly applied to customer analytics, they all share the fundamentals of data analysis, data munging, statistical and machine learning model development, and, just as crucial, the interpretation of their discovered outcomes: fundamental skills that prepare us for excellence at work.
CONCLUSION
What I like best about this approach to skill development is that we aren’t doing this because it will help us to get ahead in business. Instead, each of us thrives on new experiences and takes pleasure in developing and applying our new skills. We love the feeling of flow as we apply these skills on new projects. In Charles Duhigg’s latest book, Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, he describes a study where the most productive employees were more likely to be engaged in early stage projects that required them to think. This type of thinking is our bread and butter.
And we eat voraciously.
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