The Downsides to Good Training (Part One)

For anyone who operates in high-stress, high-consequence environments, an appropriate amount of quality training is the best way to ensure positive outcomes when it’s time to step up.

I’ve addressed the importance of Reality Based Training (train as you’re going to fight) in a couple of my previous newsletters but in this series I want to address some of the potential downsides to even the best of training.

Before I do, let’s recap the importance of quality training, starting with the Four Stage Model of Competence.

The Four Stage Model of Competence.

Initially proposed by Martin Broadwell in 1969 [i], what is now known as the Four Stage Model of Competence was initially proposed as a model to improve the skills of Bible School teachers in delivering their lessons. The stages that Broadwell observed were as follows:

· ?Unconscious Incompetence – we don’t know what we don’t know

· ?Conscious Incompetence – we know about a skill but can’t do it

· ?Conscious Competence – we can do a skill but it takes concentration

· ?Unconscious Competence – we can do a skill on autopilot

Broadwell’s model has been adapted over the years to all forms of skill acquisition and is highly relevant to skills required by military members and first responders to perform optimally in acute high-stress environments.

Neuroscience has also caught up to explain what is going on in our brains as we progress through the various stages of skill acquisition (more on that later!).

When we are presented with a new skill, such as early in the training pipeline for any role, we go from unconscious competence to conscious incompetence. Examples of this might include a paramedic seeing intravenous cannulation performed for the first time or a police officer having their first lesson with a handgun.

As the student gets the chance to practice the skill in a controlled environment, often learning individual elements of the overall skill in isolation before putting them together in a sequence, they eventually move to a state of conscious competence. They can perform the skill, but it’s using a bunch of their conscious brain bandwidth to focus on doing it correctly and safely.

This is where the first downside to good training can occur.

The confidence that comes from performing a skill at the level of conscious competence in a controlled environment (such as the classroom or training range) can delude the student into believing that the skill will be available to them in the high stress environment of the job.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The situation that can occur is a level of confidence that is disproportionately high compared to the student’s competence. This relationship is beautifully described in the Dunning-Kruger Effect [ii], illustrated in Figure 1.

The student who feels they have ‘mastered’ a skill in the training environment can find themselves at the “peak of Mount Stupid” where their confidence is high, but their actual competence is low.

In this situation, they are suffering from what Dunning and Kruger refer to a state of ‘meta-ignorance’ in which they have no way of knowing that the skill is unlikely to reliably be available to them when the stress of the situation increases significantly.

In the worst case, they find themselves unable to replicate the skill under stressful field conditions, leading to a humbling plummet into the “Valley of Despair” before returning to the training environment for a more gradual learning process that leads to skill development that is reliably reproducible under high-stress.

A great question to consider checking if you or one of your students might be on the peak of Mount Stupid is:

What tangible evidence underpins my confidence in this skill?

If the answer is “I did a cannulation once on a plastic arm in a classroom” (paramedic) or “I hit a static target at the range once” (police officer) then it might be a warning sign that you’re summiting Mount Stupid!

The Yerkes-Dodson Law

The reason that skills which can be demonstrated in a controlled environment (but are not yet mastered) are not reliably reproducible under stress is described by another fundamental model known as the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which describes an empirical relationship between stress and performance [iii]

Yerkes and Dodson were some of the first researchers to look at how arousal (stress) impacts performance and their findings demonstrated an “inverted-U” relationship between the two.

Basically, performance increases with increasing stress up to a certain point and then additional stress from that point onwards causes performance to decrease.

Understanding this drop in performance with increasing stress past the optimal point explains the potential scenario where an operator who could perform a skill in the classroom or range environment fails to perform the exact same skill in the higher-stress field environment.

The caveat to this relationship is that “simple tasks” (or well-trained tasks) can be performed reliably at a high level of competence with increasing stress. The original Yerkes-Dodson inverted-U curve is illustrated in Figure 2.

Yerkes and Dodson observed that repeated exposures to the same stress allowed for better, and eventually reliable, performance under increasing stress levels. This situation is described in the image above as “fear conditioning” and is also referred to as “stress inoculation” or simply the “training effect”.

Returning to the Four Stage Model of Competence, this is the transition from conscious competence (you can perform a skill but must think hard about it) to unconscious competence (the skill is programmed into autopilot, and you can perform it with little to no conscious thought).

Advances in neuroscience and brain imaging have allowed us to define the magic that occurs in this transition.

What is happening in the brain and body when we train a skill is the hardwiring of neural pathways.

When the skill is unfamiliar it takes a lot of conscious thought to learn and perform the task. We need to engage cortical areas of our brain – (thinking parts of our brain) to drive the motor skills required. As the brain and body begin to form the motor pathways to do the task, you become competent but still need to concentrate to get the job done (conscious competence).

When the skill has been practiced enough your brain begins to pass it down to sub-cortical regions (thalamus, basal ganglia, cerebellum) meaning that you don’t need to dedicate conscious thought to performing the task, freeing up bandwidth to be performing the task on muscle memory while also thinking of other things (unconscious competence).

Lots of our day-to-day activities are being done by these sub-cortical regions. Tasks such as brushing our teeth, driving a car, or riding a bicycle, are all examples of activities that most are familiar enough with to be routinely doing them without conscious thought.

When you think about how much practice went into getting to the point of doing these things on autopilot, that’s the same amount of training required to program the core skills for our professional roles into muscle memory so that they’re reliably there for you in high-stress situations. It’s more training than you think!

This is not new wisdom; the ancient Greek warrior-poet Archilochus offered us the following sage advice some 2600 years ago!

The best way to ensure that key skills are available to us under high-stress conditions is to drill them repeatedly through Reality Based Training, or:

Train as you’re going to fight

Train hard, train often, and train as realistically to the anticipated field environment of your role as you possibly can. When you start to feel confident in your skills, train some more.

Be able to confidently answer the question “What tangible evidence underpins my confidence in this skill?” and be as sure as you can be that you’re not standing on the summit of Mount Stupid inadvertently staring at the Valley of Despair below!

This is part one of two Downsides to Good Training – keep an eye out for my next newsletter with the second instalment!

As always, comments and questions are welcome. If you feel this newsletter might resonate with others in your community, please share it widely.

Until next time, stay safe, and don’t forget to have some fun!

Cheers,

Dr Dan Pronk

References

[i] Broadwell. MM.?- The Gospel Guardian, 1969 - edbatista.typepad.com

[ii] Dunning. D. (2011) The Dunning-Kruger Effect: On Being Ignorant of One’s Own Ignorance. In Olson & Zanna, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology Volume 44, pp. 247-96. Academic Press.

[iii] Yerkes RM, Dodson JD (1908). "The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation" . Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology. 18 (5): 459–482.

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