Practice Makes Perfect, Sometimes

When it comes to flying commercially I don’t get a choice of who is going to be in the cockpit, but if I did I would choose my pilots the same way as I would choose my surgeons.  We want our surgeons and our pilots to have beaucoup hours in their logbooks because we are putting our lives in their hands and we think that we are going to do best in the hands of someone with the most experience.

It turns out that such a viewpoint is correct some of the time, but not always.

The reasoning is straightforward:  more experienced pilots and surgeons make fewer mistakes than less experienced ones.   Well, when it comes to pilots, that isn’t exactly so.   Aviation researchers have found that highly experienced pilots tend to make just as many mistakes as less experienced ones.   There is one critical difference, however, and that is one of those differences that makes all the difference.   While more experienced pilots make just as many mistakes, they tend to recognize their mistakes and recover from them faster than their less experienced counterparts.

When it comes to medicine, the research indicates that in highly technical procedures, such as those involved in neuro- and thoracic surgery, the more procedures a physician performs the lower likelihood that mistakes will be made.   That is as expected.  But, just to make life more complicated, less experienced physicians tend to do better than more experienced physicians when treating more routine problems, perhaps because of their more recent knowledge base and fewer biases.

Years ago I remember being startled by the research finding that young, inexperienced therapists were often rated by their clients as more effective than their highly experienced counterparts.   No one knew for sure what the reasons were for this, but I hypothesized that the energy and optimism of young therapists were transmitted to their clients, whereas more experienced therapists, who had seen so much more in their lives and practices, were often jaded and less hopeful, which was also transmitted to their clients.  I imagine this may be true for physicians as well.

When a new category of airplane called “light sport aircraft” was introduced a few years ago, the idea was to create an affordable, easy-to-fly aircraft that would, in part, encourage people to enter the aviation world who otherwise couldn’t.   The light sport category has brought us literally hundreds of wonderful new aircraft, but not long after their introduction there was a noticeable jump in the number of accidents associated with flying them.   Most would think this would be because the appeal of the new aircraft would be to younger, less experienced pilots, but the accident investigations revealed that the majority of those involved in accidents by far were older, more experienced pilots who were “transitioning down” from more advanced aircraft.   It turns out that light sport aircraft each have their own idiosyncratic ways of flying them.   They are not merely baby versions of their much larger, sophisticated cousins.  So what got the experienced pilots into trouble?   I can only guess that their assumptions, or old habits, got in the way.

Given the choice between being flown around by a low-time pilot or a pilot with thousands of hours in her logbook, I am going to choose the high-timer all the time.   I feel the same way about pilots as I do about surgeons.  I suspect that people who are not actively suicidal agree.  Yet, while it is true that we often don’t get to choose our pilots, our physicians, or in these days of managed care, even our therapists, it is also true that experience isn’t always the best measure of effectiveness.   The old adage that practice makes perfect only works sometimes, especially if the thing that is being practiced are mistakes.

2 thoughts on “Practice Makes Perfect, Sometimes

  1. Love this! Makes me think of the curiosity of the ‘beginner’s mind.’ Remember any of the authors on the research about the ratings of effectiveness of new counselors?

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