Why motivation matters

Or so they say, albeit often rather glibly. We don’t like to quibble but that ‘perfect’ sounds like a tall order, especially if we’re talking about workplace skills, capabilities or behaviours. If, however, we are prepared to settle – and it would surely be realistic to do so – for ‘better’, then that is almost certainly achievable. And allowing a little lassitude is not necessarily a bad thing. As Samuel Smiles wrote in the genre-creating Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859): “he who never made a mistake, never made a discovery.”

The bigger quibble is with the word ‘practice’. We all know people who have performed the same task for many years – whether it be something as humbly domestic as cooking dinner or a service that is usually considered to be more ‘professional’ – with no detectable sign of improvement. The key is not that you practise, but what you practise and how.

Alicia Clegg, writing in the FT earlier this year, commented on a range of techniques that are being explored ‘to make training stick’, not least of them ‘olfactory effects that mimic the odours of the emergency room’. Simulating during training, real-life sights, sounds – and even smells – might make the training more interesting: they might even build some conditioned responses. But learning, though it is essential, isn’t sufficient to deliver expert performance.