An Outsider’s Perspective

In 2004, shortly after graduating from college with a degree in economics, I enrolled in the French Culinary Institute in New York to pursue a career in the food industry. There, I was immersed in a new and unfamiliar world: mother sauces, knife techniques, any number of pastry doughs, plating conventions, and machinery. What knowledge I arrived with felt deeply insufficient compared to the mountain of information I had to absorb.

Of endless fascination was observing how people learn. In the early aughts, before the birth of “foodies,” food blogs, and influencers, there were generally two types of people going to culinary school: younger individuals out of secondary or technical school, and professionals with tertiary educations desperate for a career change. The former seemed more at ease than the latter, who were accustomed to (and rewarded for) scholastic aptitude.

As this audience knows, learning manual work is a vastly different experience from learning concepts and facts. In place of lecture halls is repetitive visual observation; in place of discourse is the deconstruction of movements; in place of memorization is the embodiment of tools and muscle memory. In tactile work, it’s not enough to simply know how to do. Understanding the why and marrying it with the how is how individuals achieve expert status.

In the 20 years since, what I’ve come to discover is that the distinction between these different forms of knowledge is not often made. When tactile actions and physically executed skills are treated like concepts, or when there is an overreliance on written instructions, knowledge gaps, lagging competency, diminished confidence, and costly errors are the result.

My team and I began building Larabee as a way to improve how people learn actions and skills, envisioning a new framework for scaling expert knowledge with precision and speed. At the encouragement of biology professor Dr. Tara Scully from George Washington University, began exploring the field of forensic DNA analysis where, she argued, procedural precision was of critical importance.

To better understand what obstacles, if any, there were in training, I turned to casework supervisor Alyse Yacovone-Margetts, who generously lent me her time and insights. Against an ever-increasing backlog of work, the challenges consisted of:

The challenges you face in your labs mirror those we have seen across countless industries where actions and procedures are critical to operations. Across these industries, there are some organizations that are more focused on meeting compliance requirements than quality mentorship. But many are simply too overwhelmed to do more than take the “monkey see, monkey do” approach, are unaware that alternatives exist, or assume they are out of reach.

I believe we’re at a turning point in how complex skills are taught and mastered. Please read on to learn more about procedural learning and what we believe the future of learning entails.

Mine the Gap: Procedural vs Declarative Knowledge

Think back to the first time you learned how to tie your shoes. If that isn’t an easy memory to conjure up, what about learning how to drive a car? Knit a scarf? Tie a tie?

Each and every one of these skills has a few key similarities. They are:

By definition, these are the characteristics of a category of knowledge referred to as procedural knowledge. Procedural knowledge is a type of implicit memory involving physical or cognitive tasks, and is distinct from declarative knowledge, which is the knowledge of explicit or conscious information. If procedural knowledge represents the knowledge of how (riding a bike, performing surgical skills, typing on a keyboard), then declarative knowledge represents the knowledge of what (concepts, facts, principles, and memories).

Declarative knowledge is easy to put into words. Historical facts, philosophical theories, state capitals – this is all information that can be learned in a classroom or through a book or video. Procedural knowledge, on the other hand, is much harder to put into words. In order to learn it, you must see it. In order to become proficient, you must do it repeatedly. But once you achieve mastery and muscle memory occurs, it is knowledge that can stay with you for decades.

The problem is that procedural knowledge is often taught the way declarative knowledge is taught: in a classroom, through written instructions, or by sitting and watching a video. Each and every one of these resources is an ineffective form of guidance. In the classroom, learners are far too often passive recipients of information. Written instructions are actions that have been converted to words that have to be converted back into actions, making it subject, open to interpretation, and unclear. Videos provide visual demonstration, but how much is actually recalled when the time comes to conduct the procedure?

Good Training is Hard to Scale

What do culinary schools and medical training have in common? Both feed pressure-cooker careers, both rely heavily on hands-on operations and procedures, and both employ methods of teaching that prioritize observation, repetition, and guided improvement. Many culinary instructors rely on the “I do, you do, we do” model of teaching (also known as the “gradual release of responsibility” model), while medicine practices the “see one, do one, teach one” approach to internalizing the knowledge of skills and techniques.

Both fields of study demonstrate that in order to gain proficiency and mastery of tactile procedures, teaching must be both scaffolded and iterative. Visual observation, repetitive practice, and social engagement are paramount. This is not to say that written recipes, SOPs, and other forms of documentation aren’t important; rather, they should serve as critical reference points rather than the primary resource for teaching.

Take a written recipe, for example. An average recipe will contain countless culinary-specific terms like “fold” or “julienne.” For a novice who has no basis or experience for understanding, terms like these can be daunting. On the other hand, a proficient or expert registers these terms as clear directives without much conscious effort because they’ve already established a foundation of knowledge. In other words, written instructions are most helpful when a pre-existing framework for understanding already exists.

Undoubtedly, high-touch methods of instruction and guidance are difficult to scale. There are only so many experts and so much time. Shoulder-to-shoulder learning is significantly harder to accomplish when there are several sets of eyeballs, each representing different learning styles and any number of questions. At the same time, low-touch methods of instruction – written or linear video content – is infinitely scalable but not nearly as clear or effective. The ideal solution is an instructional format that adapts traditional apprenticeship pedagogy to the modern demands of consistency and scale.

Outcomes and Use Cases

We have discovered that when protocols are designed in a way that makes sense to the learner, we are able to minimize errors, boost consistency, and reduce time to competency by 90%. Larabee SOPs do not replace precious face-to-face interaction but maximize the expert’s time by allowing them to focus on honing practices and fine-tuning the learner’s methods, as opposed to repetitive teaching.

Living SOPs that are evergreen and can be called up on demand are as applicable to first-time analysts as they are qualified case workers:

“If a lab is modular, training might happen in the beginning of the month but the analysts don’t process until the end of the month,” says Yacovone-Margetts. This delay between observation and doing applies to the adoption of new instruments, kits, and technologies, as well as specialized techniques that are specific but irregular, like bone crushing protocols. Living SOPs that maintain the integrity and clarity of instruction, minimize the time to learn or refresh, and enable faster product or technology adoption.