For individuals and teams who want to master complex skills, practice is essential. Practice enables athletes to excel at sports, musicians to master music, and actors to enchant audiences. Practice works by allowing people to use skills in multiple low-risk experiences in special settings known as "practice fields." Here demands for superb performance, credibility, and confidence are temporarily suspended, exploratory inquiry is allowed, and "not knowing" is permitted.

Curiously, despite the proven efficacy of practice, few executives use it to hone their own - or their staff's - managerial competencies. Yet, organizational competencies involve highly complex skills that can be vastly improved with practice. In this article, we describe various kinds of practice fields and how they can help organizations enhance the performance of individuals and teams.