Actually, Guy mistakes me for a GM manager who worked in this arena during the days when I was at Ford.

The GM, John Howe and I have never met. He may not even know of me, but I’ve encountered references to him and his work repeatedly over the years.

But as Dave says, and Guy confirms from his own experience and, apparently that of my GM namesake, an expert practitioner approach to diagnosis, design and delivery can be a very useful one.

For me, the “rules of practice” that guide expert performance are the most central and interesting phenomena in the world of those attempting to learn how to do some aspect of a job competently and/or to arrange deliberate learning of that sort. The character of such rules, namely that they are inescapably applications and not just cognitive creatures. gives the lie the widespread belief that knowledge — “subject matter,” if you will, is all.

Tom Gilbert’s insight that most expert practitioner performance is not based on special abilities, but rather on skills which can often be identified and spread successfully across an entire population of performers is a real and wonderful example of actual “leveraging.”

I’ve written something more extensive on “The Notion of a Rule,” for my own “Trainer’s Notebook” blog

http://atrainersnotebook.wordpress.com/

but its not ready yet for publication. That’s why my most prominent link here is to another blog in which I pursue and exhibit my oriental rug collecting neurosis…

As you know as well as anyone, Tom Gilbert was another strong believer in the concept of exemplars. I was very struck by his PIP — the potential to improve performance — and the argument that followed from it: the greater the gap between the performance of exemplars and the performance of the average person, the easier it is to bring about improvement.

Maybe that’s fodder for another post…

I agree very much with your post – and have been using exemplars (Master Performers)in my ISD/ID methods since the late 1970s and early 1980’s – in fact my PACT Processes (covered in my lean-ISD book) distinguish between SMEs and MPs and how their knowledge/insights can leverage instructional design.

John saw this demonstrated dozens and dozens of times at GM where he and I were involved in a 5 year effort (1995-2000) to implement the PACT Processes (changed to MC/MI by GM) that lasted the first 5 Presidentsw of GMU during those 5 years.

Thanks for your continously great posts!

Guy