In this conversation, Christopher Parsons and a guest explore the concept of vicarious learning—gaining knowledge from others' experiences rather than through personal trial‑and‑error. They discuss evidence that physicians in group practices outperform solo practitioners on recertification exams, illustrating how peer interaction accelerates learning. The dialogue highlights practical mechanisms such as online professional communities (e.g., Facebook groups for robotic surgeons) that provide quick reference points for rare, high‑stakes situations. They also examine the challenges posed by long feedback cycles in highly specialized fields like architecture and construction, where projects may span years, limiting opportunities for rapid iteration. Finally, the speakers question the balance between serendipitous discovery of useful anecdotes and deliberately engineered knowledge‑sharing systems that expose newcomers to a breadth of experiences.
Can you, can you talk about vicarious learning?
Yeah. All of this, I think, really boils down to our attempts to learn from other people's experiences, particularly in healthcare, right? Other people's mistakes. Like, trial and error is sort of our least preferred way of people practicing medicine. Note I said least preferred, not never preferred, right? It is, it's the last option. But yeah, again, if you're one of the only robotic surgeons around and you've got nobody to talk to or ask, you're on a learning curve, but you're on your own learning curve. You may end up having more complications or more issues than you otherwise would. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest that there was a great study by Melissa Valentine, Amy Edmondson, Sarah Singer, I believe, and a few others in, in JAMA a while back where they found that physicians who were in group practices scored better on their recertification exams, you know, controlling for a bunch of other factors, but essentially having other people around who you could learn from.
In the same kind of specialty, is that what that means?
Exactly. Yeah. So if you were a solo practitioner, so you're a cardiologist in an office by yourself, or you're part of Parsons and Co. Cardiology where there's 5 of us working together as cardiologists. If you were from a group practice, you tended to score better on these recertification exams. That was sort of the gist, and I, I may be misremembering the specifics, but the general sense was having people around helped you out because you learned lessons from their experience. You could bounce ideas off of them. It, it all came back to this: how do I glean a lesson from an experience that you've had so I don't have to wait to have it myself? Or if I do have it, I'm one degree more prepared. And that's really this idea of vicarious learning, learning from the lessons of another's experiences rather than our own. And I've studied this in a lot of different contexts throughout healthcare organizations. We've seen it in other organizations as well, but this ability to draw some insight or some lesson from an experience that somebody else has had just arms us with a broader repertoire of experiences. So if I'm that robotic surgeon in the middle of Wisconsin, nobody else is around, but I'm on this Facebook group. And so, yeah, yesterday I happened to watch your video where you showed a thing that you had done to deal with a, a certain kind of issue. Great. I kind of log that away. It's not that I'm learning any real declarative knowledge or gaining anything, but in 2 weeks when I see that same challenge, I kind of go, oh right, I remember that guy went around to the right instead of to the left. You know, maybe I'll try that. And it just kind of gives you these little reference points or frames that you can refer back to rather than figuring it out on your own where you go left and you realize like, oh, okay, that wasn't Correct. So next time I'll know. Well, it's hard in an era where the next times are fewer and farther between. And I think we're definitely seeing that across all industries where things are getting so specialized and so complex in the world of knowledge work that it's not like we're getting another chance right away to try it again or to make 10,000 of the same products. You don't build 10,000 of the same building to be able to learn from your experience on that kind of rapid cycle. This may be the one cantilever design you're doing for the next 10 years, and it's going to be a decade before you come back around to another project like that. Right. So, yeah.
Or even once you do the design, it's 4 years before it's built. So the feedback cycle is super, super long.
Yeah. Thanks for bailing me out there. I said cantilevered and that was as much as— that was good architecture as I could work in there.
I think I'm impressed with when it comes to the vicarious learning. I'm curious, like how much of this tends to be serendipitous? Like if X person happens to do this thing versus kind of more orchestrated where, you know, we want new people to see a bunch of different stories from a bunch of different people. What's your experience there?
I think again, the unsatisfying answer of yes, both, right? That both of these have a big role to play. There's so many case examples that we could cite of the serendipitous learning examples that pop up where somebody happens to share a failure of a project in making glue that then solved somebody's problem of needing to put bookmarks on very thin, brittle Bible pages. The net result is Post-it notes, right? You know, we, we've seen all those kind of serendipitous ones, but I do think we're seeing organizations also try to orchestrate this a little bit more. I mean, Google's classic phrase of engineering serendipity, right? You know, wanting people to bump into each other, at work, right? Rotational programs that intentionally take people all around the organization and expose them to different experiences. So I think intuitively we kind of know that if we can create the opportunities for these different interactions, then that creates opportunities for us to learn from a broad set of others.
