Purposeful practice: Ericsson's recipe for expertise
Twenty years of experience as a project manager – is that a guarantee of skill? No. Research on expertise reveals something uncomfortable: beyond a certain level, sheer experience doesn't make us any better. Many people plateau early and stay there for decades, fully occupied with doing the same thing they've always done.
The psychologist Anders Ericsson, a Swedish-born professor in Florida, devoted his career to studying how experts become experts – musicians, chess players, athletes, physicians. In the 2016 book Peak, written with journalist Robert Pool, he summed up the answer: it's not the amount of practice that matters, but the kind.
What does the research say?
Ericsson distinguishes between naive practice – doing the same thing over and over and hoping to improve – and purposeful practice. Purposeful practice has four hallmarks: a well-defined goal just beyond your current ability, full concentration on the task, immediate feedback on how it went, and repetition where you adjust based on that feedback. Driving is the standard example of naive practice: most people don't become better drivers from twenty years of commuting, because none of the four hallmarks is present. The same mechanism applies to meetings, negotiations and one-on-ones – we do plenty of them, but without goals and feedback nothing gets sharpened.
A key concept is that practice should sit just outside your comfort zone. Too easy – no growth. Too hard – nothing but frustration. Development happens in the narrow band where you fail sometimes but can understand why. That also explains why experts need to keep training deliberately: anyone who just "keeps working" drifts back into the comfort zone.
Ericsson also emphasized the role of feedback. Without fast, specific information about what went well and what didn't, the brain can't adjust. That's why coaches, teachers and clear metrics are recurring features of every environment that produces genuine expertise.
What does this mean for you as a project manager?
Examine your own "practice". Are you running your fiftieth project the same way you ran your tenth? Then pick one well-defined skill at a time – say, handling objections in the steering committee, or delivering hard news without wrapping it in cotton wool – and set a concrete goal for the next occasion. One well-defined skill at a time, with clear intent.
Get feedback where none occurs naturally. Everyday difficult conversations rarely provide honest responses – the other person doesn't say "you lost me there". Ask a colleague to sit in and observe one specific thing, replay the conversation for yourself afterwards, or use a training environment where feedback is built in.
And dose the difficulty deliberately: take on situations that are slightly too hard, in settings where failure is cheap. Waiting for reality to serve up appropriately difficult challenges at an appropriate pace is leaving your development to chance. Real projects are also an expensive training arena – one failed steering committee meeting costs trust that takes months to rebuild.
How to train this
Ericsson's four criteria are, in practice, the blueprint behind Project-simulator: every scenario has a defined goal, the difficulty adapts so the next exercise sits at the edge of your ability, and you get immediate feedback anchored in your own words – then you can run it again. Try it free for a week at project-simulator.com.
In Project-simulator you practice these conversations against an AI counterpart and get feedback grounded in research like this.
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