Making a Wicked Learning Environment More Kind

When feedback isn't automatic, you should build it

Last month, I had the pleasure of joining Forrest Hanson on “Being Well,” a mental health-focused podcast that he often co-hosts with his father, psychologist Rick Hanson. At one point, we discussed how professionals who specialize very narrowly can sometimes become rigid and stop improving.

One manifestation of this is the so-called Einstellung effect, in which a problem solver reflexively relies on familiar methods — even when they no longer work, or better ones are available. (It’s basically the “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” problem.) When I brought it up, Forrest shared an insight I’d never heard before:

“There’s a lot of research on whether or not therapy works. We find over and over again that it works. It does pretty well, it’s got good effect sizes, all of that. The problem, as near as we can tell, is that more experienced therapists just do not have better outcomes than newer therapists…The best piece of research I’ve ever seen on it was 2016 (Goldberg), it actually suggested that therapeutic outcomes got slightly worse as the clinician got more experienced.”

The study he referenced examined pre/post-therapy changes for about 6,600 patients working with 170 different therapists. Overall, it documented a (small) reduction in therapist effectiveness as time in practice or number of cases increased.

Forrest offered a possible explanation: therapy, he said, is a “wicked learning environment” for therapists themselves. That term comes from psychologist Robin Hogarth, who used it to describe situations in which people don’t necessarily learn from experience — in part because feedback is delayed, or inaccurate. In contrast, “kind learning environments” have built-in feedback that is clear and immediate, which helps people improve over time. Think: practicing free throws. You shoot; you miss; you adjust. In wicked learning environments, feedback may even be missing altogether. As Forrest pointed out, many therapists don’t have any system for feedback.

Hogarth and his colleagues found that in wicked learning environments, people often gain confidence without gaining skill — a dangerous combination. Perhaps that can help explain why experience alone doesn’t predict better outcomes in therapy. But the Goldberg study also included an important caveat: “despite the overall tendency for outcomes to decline,” some therapists did improve over time.

Building on a suggestion by the study authors, Forrest argued that therapists can improve “if there was some kind of structure in place where they got feedback from clients, or they tracked their outcomes over time, or they were part of a broader institution that cared about improving therapeutic outcomes.”

One of Hogarth’s main tips for making wicked learning environments more kind was what he called “borrowing from the scientific method”: form a hypothesis, test it, reflect, revise — and repeat. The core idea is to approach any area of work or life a little more like a scientist — using a cycle of experimentation, feedback, and reflection.

The importance of consistent, honest feedback and reflection showed up repeatedly in my research for Range. Surgical teams that set aside regular time for group reflection after surgery improved more rapidly than teams that simply repeated a procedure. And in decades-long forecasting research led by Philip Tetlock, part of what drove improvement in people’s ability to make accurate predictions was simply keeping track of every forecast and reflecting on mistakes.

As Tetlock’s colleague and decision-making researcher Pavel Atanasov once put it: “If your process does not include a structured way to learn from outcomes, you need a better process.” I think that applies to just about everything.

Thanks for reading. Two years ago I interviewed Hogarth and his coauthor about their then-new book, The Myth of Experience. You can read that post here.

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Until next time…
David