There’s no playbook for business, leadership and life. There’s no single archetype to embody. The journey to mastery that I help take my coaching clients on is a journey of unfolding and becoming in accordance with their own values, principles, morals, beliefs and experience.

But how can you speed up that journey? As a coach, how can I work with someone who already has a good level of business experience and help them accelerate the rate at which they become an even better executive?

It turns out the authors of a fascinating book called Accelerated Expertise: Training for High Proficency in a Complex World were asking themselves similar questions and forging their own theory about this, on behalf of the US Department of Defense. The DoD was trying to wrap its head around the changing nature of warfare. They recognised that speed in acquiring the knowledge and skills to perform tasks is crucial, “yet it ordinarily takes many years to achieve high proficiency in countless jobs and professions in government, business, industry, and throughout the private sector”. Wouldn’t there be great advantages if regimens of training could be established that could accelerate the achievement of high levels of proficiency?

Business is not warfare but the military serves as a helpful metaphor, and there is a universal applicability of the book’s core theories and ideas as they relate to the acceleration of executive proficiency. It asks questions that will sound familiar to any business executive, like:

“How can we train for adaptivity and the need to cope with the ever-changing workplace and changing and challenging activities?”

“How can we train for resilience in the face of increasing complexity and unexpected events stretching resources and capabilities?”

Whether you are in the military, or a startup founder, CEO, other executive or professional, there’s a theoretical underpinning that supports anyone’s journey to mastery. By understanding it, you can speed it up.