Here is an excerpt from an article written by H. James Wilson for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Have you completed your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice?

The idea that 10,000 hours (about 1 year and 51 days total) of practice is what you need to gain expertise in performance-based fields was initially popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Outliers. The research results he focused on emphasized the benefits of practice for fine-motor activities like playing the piano. But more recent studies show the upside of the 10,000-hour benchmark for collaborative knowledge work — the type of expertise required to create, or lead, or grow a company.
For most of us, of course, logging that much deliberate practice may seem unattainable in today’s time-scarce business environments. Employees barely have enough time to complete job responsibilities, no less find extra hours to practice their skills. (Even if your company generously put aside two-and-a-half work weeks per year for you to practice skills, it would still take you 100 years before you hit the 10,000 hour benchmark).

But what if deliberate practice was your job, and the way your organization did business? Then you and colleagues could feasibly hit this threshold for mastery in as little as 5 years. Here are three tips, grounded in our recent Babson Executive Education study of over 500 companies, to accelerate this process:

Try experimentation. Previous studies show that experimentation is one of the most fundamental forms of deliberate practice we can engage in. By performing more of their work in the form of experiments, employees can synchronously advance projects while putting hours in toward their 10,000. This synchronicity can result in stronger organizational performance, according to our data. Experimentation-oriented organizations, one-quarter of our survey sample, are more than 4 times as likely to have achieved greater than 20% growth over the past year compared to others in the sample.

How is an experimental approach different than business as usual? Much of conventional organizational work is about planning and analyzing how to act, often on a large scale; risk is controlled by repeatable processes and standard routines. Rather than planning to do things, experimenting means doing things in a new way on a small scale. You get quick feedback, allowing you to make timely adjustments and improvements. On seeing the results of your action, practitioners can adopt the new way, discard it, or modify it and try again.

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H. James Wilson is senior researcher at Babson Executive Education. He is co-author of The New Entrepreneurial Leader: Developing Leaders Who Shape Social and Economic Opportunity (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011). You can visit him at Twitter.