Stepend Dubner and Steven Levitt have a great article in the NY Times today entitled A Star Is Made.

The authors of Freakanomics discuss a strange fact:

If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month's World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months

To explain this, Dubner and Levitt turn to some research by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson. Ericsson's research focuses on what makes any star performer great. Ericsson describes his area of interest as The Acquisition of Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice.

I recommend reading the Dubner and Levitt article, but here are the high level points:

• Most differences in ability are not due to natural talent, but instead are due to practice.
• To increase the chances of producing Expert Performance, the practice must involve direct and immediate feedback.

Dubner and Levitt say this:

Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good.

It's the connection with feedback that is interesting

Dr. Ericsson has proven that most people can get very good at highly specific skills with lots of practice, as long as that practice involves immediate feedback. Dr. Ericsson says that surgeons improve during their career because they have clear goals and immediate feedback. Dr. Ericsson says that other medical risk doctors getting worse because they do not receive constant immediate feedback. If you give a patient a check-up, it might be years before you find out whether you missed something critical.

Bucking for profit

When I was in graduate school at SFU, I heard a story of how a lumber company used this insight to improve the quality of timber being sent to market. The issue was a dynamic programming problem. Over time the demand and hence the price of certain cuts of wood changed. Sometimes, 8ft long 2x4 was relatively more highly prized. Sometimes, the market really wanted 6ft x 8ft boards.

The lumber company was facing a problem, however. The logs that were being sent to the mill had not necessarily been cut specifically to suit the markets demands.

The problem came when a freshly cut tree was chopped into the huge logs that are then trucked to the lumber mills. The process is called bucking. An expert, called a Bucker, walks along the fleshly cut tree and marks where it should be cut into sections. The Bucker selects these points by factoring in the straightness of the truck, and where knots in the wood are likely to exist. The Bucker is also supposed to take into account the latest market reports.

Unfortunately, regardless of the market reports, the Buckers were always sending back the same fairly random distribution of logs.

As a result, the lumber company was losing, on average, thousands of dollars per tree just because the trees had not been optimally bucked for the current market conditions.

The problem was solved with a little dynamic programming and a video game.

The lumber company brought in a consulting firm, who helped them to develop a fairly simply dynamic programming model that could determine how each log should be bucked given current market conditions.

Next, rather than firing the Buckers, and most likely causing a massive strike, the firm used a simple game-boy and the same dynamic programming model to retrain the Buckers on a weekly basis.

Every Monday, the Buckers were required to spend the first part of their day playing the newly updated game. The game showed the Bucker random tree trunks, each with unique characteristics for straightness and knots. The Bucker then simply moved a pointer to show where he would mark the truck to be bucked into logs.

The game would then give the Bucker a score and show him where he should have marked the tree to achieve the highest score.

As soon as the Buckers achieved 30 perfect scores in a row, they were allowed to begin work. They got paid by the log, so they were always keen to get going.

The big pay off

The result was tremendous. The lumber company saw their average returns per tree shoot up. The result was less waste and more profit.

The importance of feedback

The emergent intelligence that Steven Johnson talks about, the wisdom of the crowd that James Surowiecki talks about; this kind of collective intelligence only happens when a system includes both positive and negative feed-back loops.

In the context of managing a flat organization, if you think of your organization like something akin to a living organism, the only way to make it smarter is to build in feedback loops.

You can enhance an organization's intelligence by enhancing internal communication.

Today, almost all strategic communication in most large organizations is channeled through hierarchies.

If you have a brilliant idea for a new product, or a strategic innovation, you need to move that idea up the political chain. Your success as an internal entrepreneur depends not on the merits of your idea, but instead on your political skills.

This is in marked contrast to truly flat organizations, such as universities, or rare companies like Google. At universities, and at Google, people can talk directly to their peers through efficient organization wide broadcast tools, such as enterprise blogs and wikis. People are then brought together through something as simple as search.

And then, they learn from each other, and collectively become smarter through simple feedback mechanisms, such as comments and track backs.

Feedback, practice and being born close to the cut-off

Why are most star soccer players born near the beginning of the year? The cut off for youth league age groups on Dec 31 in most of Europe. If you are born on Dec 31, you are competing for a place on the team against kids who are 364 days older than you. If you are born on Jan 1st, you are the oldest kid on the team. Older, more mature, more likely to get picked, and more likely to get all the practice needed to become a star.