In the twentieth century, two groups of people independently figured out how to turn ordinary performance into extraordinary results.
One group studied people. The other studied processes. For over a hundred years, they never talked to each other.
That gap—between developing people and designing work—is the most expensive problem in business today. It's also the problem that Deliberate Work was built to solve.
Lineage One
The Practice Tradition: How Do I Get Better?
In 1993, a Swedish psychologist named K. Anders Ericsson published a paper that would reshape how the world thinks about expertise. Studying violinists at a Berlin music academy, Ericsson found that what separated the best from the merely good wasn't innate talent. It was the accumulated hours of a very specific kind of practice—practice that was individualized, coach-directed, focused on weaknesses, and structured around immediate feedback. He called it deliberate practice.
The idea was powerful and precise: expertise isn't born, it's built. And it's built through a specific process that can be defined, measured, and replicated.
Malcolm Gladwell turned this into the "10,000 hour rule" in Outliers in 2008, which oversimplified the research but put "deliberate practice" into the mainstream vocabulary. Geoff Colvin's Talent is Overrated extended it into business settings. Angela Duckworth connected it to grit. Cal Newport wove it into his Deep Work philosophy. Daniel Coyle studied "talent hotbeds" where disproportionate skill development occurred.
All of these thinkers made valuable contributions. But they all shared one fundamental assumption: the unit of analysis is the individual. The question they were all trying to answer was the same:
How do I get better?
And for structured domains—music, chess, athletics, surgery—the framework worked beautifully. These are domains with clear performance metrics, established training methods, qualified coaches, and immediate feedback.
Then people tried to apply it to business. And the framework hit a wall.
Ericsson himself used a telling example in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article. Radiologists, he observed, have been diagnosing breast cancer at roughly 70% accuracy for decades. Young radiologists learn by working alongside more experienced ones—who are themselves only 70% accurate. Individual practice without system redesign produces a ceiling, not a trajectory.
Ericsson's proposed solution was still individual: practice with a verified case library for immediate feedback. A better version of individual practice, but individual practice nonetheless.
By 2019, in what would be one of his final major papers, Ericsson acknowledged that the conditions required for true deliberate practice—structured domains, qualified teachers, established training methods—"were rarely met" outside the domains where his research originated. Business, with its ambiguity, delayed feedback, and ill-defined success metrics, simply didn't fit the model.
A major meta-analysis by Hambrick, Macnamara, and Oswald in 2020 landed an even harder blow: across 25 years of accumulated research, deliberate practice accounted for only 14% of the variance in performance. Environment, tools, cognitive factors, and system design accounted for the rest.
The most honest assessment came from Cedric Chin, a business practitioner and writer at Commoncog, who in 2019 publicly admitted that despite years of effort, he could not make deliberate practice work for his career. The framework, he concluded, was designed for structured domains and simply didn't map to the messy reality of knowledge work and business.
Here's the pattern every "deliberate practice at work" article follows: This framework is amazing → here's how it works for musicians and athletes → now let's apply it to business → it's really hard and doesn't map cleanly. Every author stalls at the same point. They all keep the unit of analysis as the individual and never make the leap to the system level.
Nobody asked the next question: What if the problem isn't the people? What if it's the work?
Lineage Two
The Systems Tradition: How Does the Process Get Better?
While Ericsson was studying violinists, a completely separate intellectual tradition had been asking a different question for nearly a century.
1913 — Henry Ford
Ford combined interchangeable parts, division of labor, and continuous flow to create the moving assembly line. Model T assembly time dropped from 12.5 hours to 93 minutes. Ford didn't train his workers to be better craftsmen. He redesigned the work itself so that ordinary workers could produce extraordinary output.
Ford proved something the practice tradition never considered: you can design work so the system delivers consistent results, regardless of individual talent.
But Ford's insight came with a brutal cost. The work was so dehumanizing that in 1913 alone, Ford had to hire 52,000 workers to maintain a workforce of 14,000. His famous $5/day wage wasn't generosity—it was a retention band-aid for work that consumed people. Ford designed extraordinary systems but treated people as interchangeable components.
1948 — The McDonald Brothers
Richard and Maurice McDonald closed their profitable drive-in restaurant for three months and reopened with something radically different: the Speedee Service System. They slashed the menu to nine items. Standardized every order down to the number of pickles. Specialized every task. Redesigned the kitchen for flow.
The result: faster service, lower prices, higher volume, and zero dependence on finding skilled short-order cooks. The McDonald brothers proved that Ford's principles weren't limited to manufacturing. You could systematize service delivery.
1955 — Walt Disney
Disney took it further still—into experience design. Every touchpoint orchestrated. Backstage and onstage separated. "Cast members" following carefully designed scripts and systems. The magic wasn't in finding magical people. It was in designing an environment where the experience was consistently excellent.
1984 — G. Lynn Shostack
Shostack formalized this thinking in a Harvard Business Review paper titled "Designing Services That Deliver." She argued that services fail not because of human incompetence, but because of the lack of systematic method for design and control. She named only two organizations who had gotten it right: McDonald's and Walt Disney.
Shostack's diagnosis was prophetic. She saw the problem with perfect clarity forty years ago. But her solution—service blueprinting—remained a design tool. It mapped services. It never became an operating system for running them.
1950s–70s — Toyota
The Toyota Production System took Ford's systems thinking and fixed its fatal flaw. Toyota added two principles Ford never considered: continuous improvement (kaizen) and respect for people. Workers weren't just executing the process—they were empowered to stop the line, identify problems, and improve the system itself. Standard work wasn't a ceiling imposed on people; it was a baseline from which they drove improvement.
Toyota came the closest to synthesis. But translating TPS from the factory floor to services and knowledge work has been the great unsolved challenge of the Lean movement for decades. The factory metaphors—production lines, takt time, material flow—don't map cleanly to a consulting engagement, a roofing project, or a dental practice.
The systems tradition had its own wall: extraordinary process thinking that struggled to cross the boundary from manufacturing to the domains where most people actually work.
The Wall Both Traditions Hit
Here's what's remarkable: both traditions failed at exactly the same boundary, for opposite reasons.
The Practice Tradition's Failure
Kept the unit of analysis as the individual. No matter how much you train the radiologist, the roofing crew, or the sales team—if the work itself isn't designed to apply, reinforce, and build on what they learn, the training doesn't transfer. Individual development without system design produces heroes who burn out, not organizations that sustain excellence.
The Systems Tradition's Failure
Often treated people as interchangeable components in a machine. Ford's assembly line and McDonald's Speedee System produced remarkable consistency, but at the cost of dehumanizing the work. And when Lean consultants tried to bring factory thinking into services, the translation broke down.
The practice people knew how to develop people but had no framework for the work surrounding them. The systems people knew how to design processes but often ignored the humans inside them.
Each tradition held half the answer. Neither alone could solve the problem that matters most to business owners: How do you produce excellent outcomes consistently, without depending on heroic effort from a few exceptional people?
The Convergence
Where the Two Lineages Meet
I didn't discover this gap by reading about it. I lived on both sides of it.
The Practice Lineage, Lived
As a competitive speed skater, I trained at the national level, finishing as the national championship overall runner-up and setting national records along the way. Every session structured. Every stride analyzed. I lived what Ericsson described. Later, as a ski racing coach, I applied those same principles to developing young athletes—and won a Michigan state championship doing it.
The Systems Lineage, Lived
In high school, I spent half of every school day in Pinckney, Michigan's cooperative Robotics and Automation program—programming industrial robots and PLCs, designing workcells. Two years in a row, our workcells won Best of Show. From there I went straight into industrial automation. The lesson was always the same: in a well-designed system, the outcome is precise because the system is precise.
When I moved into building and consulting with businesses, the gap between these two worlds became impossible to ignore. I would see business owners pour money into training their teams—better sales training, better project management courses, better leadership development—and watch the investment evaporate within weeks because the work itself wasn't designed to absorb or reinforce any of it. The training was deliberate. The work was not.
I would also see companies implement Lean or process improvement initiatives that optimized workflows on paper but ignored the people executing them. The processes looked efficient. The results were mediocre. Because the systems were designed for compliance, not for development.
Deliberate Practice asks
How do I get better?
Systems Design asks
How does the process get better?
Deliberate Work asks
How does the work itself get better?
The work is not just the process, and it's not just the people. It's the system, the people, and the feedback loops that connect them. Design all three together, and you get something neither tradition could produce alone: an organization where the system produces excellence and the people within it continuously develop.
What Deliberate Work Looks Like in Practice
This isn't abstract theory. Deliberate Work is built on specific, implementable principles drawn from both traditions.
Value Stream Design
Maps the work from trigger to outcome—not as a process flowchart for compliance, but as the architecture within which people operate. Every step has a clear purpose, a defined standard, and a feedback mechanism. Shostack would recognize the blueprint. Toyota would recognize the flow. But instead of stopping at the map, Deliberate Work turns it into the operating system for daily execution.
Standard Work as Baseline, Not Ceiling
Ford and McDonald's used standardization to constrain workers. Toyota used it as a foundation for improvement. Deliberate Work follows Toyota's lead: standard work captures today's best known method, and then provides the structured environment for people to improve it. This is where Ericsson's practice principles re-enter the picture—embedded in the work itself rather than isolated in a training program.
Embedded Feedback Loops
Ericsson identified immediate feedback as essential to deliberate practice. In most businesses, feedback is delayed, ambiguous, and disconnected from the work. Deliberate Work builds feedback into the workflow—not as a performance review, but as a natural property of how the work operates.
Remember the radiologists stuck at 70%? Ericsson's solution was a practice library where individuals could check their accuracy. A Deliberate Work approach goes further: redesign the diagnostic workflow so that pathology results are systematically routed back to the original reader. Build structured peer review into the daily schedule. Integrate AI-assisted screening as a real-time second opinion. The feedback isn't a training exercise you do on the side—it's a property of the system you work within.
Workflow Orchestration
Connects these elements into a coherent operating rhythm. The work flows. People develop. The system improves. Not because someone heroically manages all of it, but because the work was designed to produce these outcomes.
Geoff Colvin described a company that created a simulation of its own operations—production, packing, shipping. Teams ran 12 weeks of simulated operations in five-hour sessions, experimenting with new solutions. Monthly revenue loss dropped from $700,000 to under $50,000 within two years. Colvin framed this as organizations "applying deliberate practice." But look closer: what actually happened was systematic work redesign with embedded practice. That's not deliberate practice applied to organizations. That's Deliberate Work.
Why This Matters Now
The lineage matters because it reveals that Deliberate Work isn't a buzzword or a new spin on existing ideas. It's the resolution of a conversation that two intellectual traditions have been having—separately—for over a century.
Deliberate Practice proved that expertise is built, not born. That was revolutionary. Systems Design proved that excellence can be engineered into the work itself. That was equally revolutionary. But for decades, the people studying how individuals improve and the people studying how systems improve never connected their work.
The result is the landscape most business owners inhabit today: they invest in training that doesn't transfer, implement processes that ignore the humans executing them, and depend on heroic effort from a few key people to hold it all together. They're stuck choosing between developing their people and designing their systems—when the answer requires both.
Design the work deliberately, and you don't have to choose between great people and great systems. You get both.
That's not genius. It's not a brilliant flash that can never be duplicated—which is exactly what Shostack said breakthroughs in service delivery always seemed to be. It's a methodology. It can be learned, applied, and scaled. And it's long overdue.
Go Deeper
The methodology. The book.
Deliberate Work: Designing How Your Business Actually Runs takes these principles and turns them into a playbook. Value stream design, standard work, workflow orchestration—everything you need to move from heroics to systems.
Get Early AccessSee the framework in action
The blog applies Deliberate Work thinking to real companies—the same ones that shaped these two lineages.
References
Chin, C. (2019). "The Problems with Deliberate Practice." Commoncog.
Colvin, G. (2008). Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else. Portfolio/Penguin.
Coyle, D. (2009). The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How. Bantam Books.
Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Scribner.
Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. Th., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance." Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406.
Ericsson, K. A., Prietula, M. J., & Cokely, E. T. (2007). "The Making of an Expert." Harvard Business Review, July–August 2007.
Ericsson, K. A., & Harwell, K. W. (2019). "Deliberate Practice and Proposed Limits on the Effects of Practice on the Acquisition of Expert Performance." Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2396.
Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. Little, Brown and Company.
Hambrick, D. Z., Macnamara, B. N., & Oswald, F. L. (2020). "Is the Deliberate Practice View Defensible? A Review of Evidence and Discussion of Issues." Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1134.
Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing.
Ohno, T. (1988). Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Productivity Press.
Shostack, G. L. (1984). "Designing Services That Deliver." Harvard Business Review, January–February 1984.
Sonnenberg, M., & Seidel, V. (2022). "Expertise Development in the Business-to-Business Sales Domain." Vocations and Learning, 16, 63–91. Springer.
Joe Minock is the founder of The Deliberate Company and creator of the Deliberate Work methodology. His background spans competitive athletics, industrial automation, and 25 years of building businesses and designing workflows.