EXPLORE

The four Features of Expertise

Understanding any expert action requires knowing its four features:

  1. its DOMAIN ,

  2. the GOAL being addressed,

  3. the PHASE of the goal being used, and

  4. the STEP being taken to get to the next phase.

We explain these in the sections below with blue, green, white, and navy backgrounds.

After you read through the feature descriptions, explore the travel domain.

Domains

  • Click to see the list of Professions

  • Click to see the list of Trades

  • Click to see the list of Social Activities

  • Click to see the list of Personal Activities

Work

Life

Goals

Why nine goals?

  • Choose what to sense: to look at, listen to, touch, smell, or taste.

  • Day dream by choosing memories of prior experiences or imaginations of possibilities.

  • Speak to or comprehend others using shared symbols.

  • Modify practices to a new situation in order to accomplish satisfying outcomes.

  • Infer and predict the beliefs, thoughts, inentions, and emotions of others.

  • Accomplish satisfying outcomes that cannot be achieved without another person.

  • Select practices that are widely observed and accepted in a culture and sometimes codified in laws or well-known maxims.

  • Focus on, remember, and sequence practices in order to achieve a satisfying outcome.. Yhis is often done while interacting with others.

  • Use language or technology to organize and preserve experience for later use by oneself or other people.


Focus

Process

Interact

Integrate

Phases

  • Steep out of your comfort zone with a domain goal you have not tried before. This phase is very easy to learn and takes little involvement to do so.

  • Get more involved with a domain goal by trying quickly learned practices. Hanging on to any of these simple modes too long eventually creates problems.

  • Use a rich variety of practices that you have learned over the years to perform and adjust automatically. These are the practices that work over long periods of time.

  • Teach others to use the rich variety of practices that you learned over the years.

  • Know a goal so well that you can make discoveries or innovations that other people use.

Steps

  • Identifying a need for change is the first of four steps of needed to learn a new phase or practice for any goal.

  • Reflect on a dilemma, examine your role in it, discuss it with a friend, and identify a new phase.

  • Plan, rehearse, and get feedback from a person who has more experience with a new phase.

  • The last step of achieving a new mode of practice for a goal is when you perform it regularly.