Deliberate practice: how focused training makes you an expert
Why do some project managers get better every year, while others seem to stand still despite long experience? The question is older than the project management profession itself, and one of the most influential answers came in 1993 from psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues.
Their concept of deliberate practice has since shaped how we think about expertise in music, sports, medicine and leadership. The core message is uncomfortable but liberating: expertise is not primarily a matter of talent or years on the job, but of how you train.
What does the research say?
Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer studied, among others, violinists at a music academy in Berlin and compared the very best with those who were good but not at the top. What separated the groups was not total time with the instrument, but the amount of focused, effortful solo practice: training aimed at specific weaknesses, with clear goals and immediate feedback.
The researchers defined deliberate practice through a few characteristics. The training is designed to improve one delimited part of performance, not just to complete the task. It sits just beyond your current ability, so it feels effortful. It provides fast, concrete feedback on what went well and what did not. And it is repeated, with adjustments between each attempt.
The most important conclusion for working life is that experience by itself is not enough. Doing the same thing many times cements habits, both good and bad. Without targeted practice and feedback, development plateaus, often quite early in a career. That explains why the number of completed projects says surprisingly little about how skilled a project manager is in, say, difficult conversations.
What does this mean for you as a project manager?
First: train one thing at a time. Getting better at meetings is not a training goal; opening every status meeting with a clear intention, or asking one follow-up question before responding to an objection, is. Pick one delimited skill, stick with it for a few weeks, then switch.
Next: seek feedback close in time. Ask a colleague to observe one specific thing in your next meeting and tell you what they saw, the same day. The longer the gap between action and feedback, the weaker the learning. Vague verdicts like "that went fine" don't help; ask for concrete observations.
Finally: pitch yourself at the right level of difficulty. If all your conversations feel comfortable, you are not training, you are just performing. Deliberately take on the negotiation or the delivery message that chafes a little. It is in the effort, not the routine, that ability grows. Expect real practice to feel hard, too; Ericsson and his colleagues noted that deliberate practice, unlike both work and play, is rarely enjoyable in the moment, precisely because it targets what you do not yet master.
How to practice this
The problem in working life is that difficult conversations are rare, costly to fail in, and rarely followed by honest feedback. A simulator solves all three: you can repeat the same kind of conversation many times, focus on one skill at a time, raise the difficulty step by step and get feedback that points to exactly what you said. That is deliberate practice applied to project management. Try Project-simulator free for a week and feel the difference from just accumulating experience.
In Project-simulator you practice these conversations against an AI counterpart and get feedback grounded in research like this.
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