When you perform some action, your body and/or you mind are performing a task. You are deploying all the resources to accomplish that task. Your entire being orients itself towards the accomplishment. If you can actually perform the task with any level of fluency, all of this happens automatically. When you speak, your mouth opens and makes the right shapes, when you walk, your body changes posture, when you read, your eyes focus and your brain is attuned to perceiving ink blots on a page as meaningful.
In some ways, you only know what the task is from the posture you adopt. A good example is demonstrating running. When you are asked to adopt a static pose of a runner, you will most likely stand on one foot, lean forward, step out with the other foot and put your arm forward. Most people (as online photos show) put the same arm forward as their forward foot. This is also how the author of a poster for a pre-war Olympics drew a runner.
However, the problem with this is that it is the exact opposite of what people do when running. When you run the arm that is in front of the body, is the one that is the opposite of the forward foot. We have all run, a professional artist is skilled at depicting what they see. Yet, we so easily get it wrong. Why is that?
That is because the task of running and the task of adopting a static pose of a runner are fundamentally different. They have different goals, they require a different perspective, they employ different muscles, and so on. We therefore naturally adopt a different posture to complete these two different tasks - even though when we talk about them, we think of the pose as just a snapshot of the actual run. But our mental and physical orientation is directed towards the actual task, not our expectation of what it will be.
When what we are saying we are doing and what our mind and body are actually trying to is different is a ‘task misalignment’. And how do we know that we have a task misalignment? It may take a while but a good clue is that our posture during practice is different from the posture during performance of the activity itself.
The idea of a task is fundamental to help us practice the right thing. Task is what you are actually doing, not what you are saying you’re doing. This is not just relevant to physical poses. Famously, we may say we are learning a subject when we are really primarily learning to pass an exam in the subject. This is important because we orient all of our efforts towards that task. So a person who is learning about something because they want to solve a problem will approach the task very differently from someone who wants to pass an exam.
This is true even in the more extensive physical activities like distance running. We may think that the aim of a professional runner is to be able to run fast but it fact it is to win races, set records or beat opponents. This means that the practice is not only focusing on speed but on speed that peaks at particular time and can be deployed in a particular contexts. So an athlete will structure their training very carefully to be ready on race day - not just to run fast at some point.
The problem is that our vision of what the task is, is compromised by our way of talking about it. We will say that we want to learn to play the piano but not say, we want to learn to play it so that we can play a three songs we like for pleasure. These are different tasks.
The next key concept is that of posture. Task is what our body and mind orients itself to do. It is the posture we take to solve the task. Posture here is a metaphor - it may not be an actual physical pose. But that may be a component of it.
That’s also why experts are often bad teachers of their subject - they are performing a different task. Native speakers are not always automatically good teachers of their language or translators. Teaching and translation are different tasks and when we get ready to perform them, we adopt different postures than when we are simply trying to say something.
This has both positive and negative consequences. Negative in that we often spend a lot of time practicing to adopt the wrong posture for the actual task. Positive in that the actual task does not depend so much on the sequence as described in a textbook (writing a textbook is a different task which makes the writer adopt a different posture).
So we can run before we can walk, we can learn sign language before spoken language, we can learn more difficult math before easier math, we can learn useful medical diagnostics before learning about complex chemistry. We can learn to play jazz before the classical piano or even before any basic pop-songs. All of those things are different tasks.
Task misalignment is incredibly common but it can also reveal much about both the mental schemas and targets for actual practice. That’s why it is important to spend a certain amount of time closely examining examples of task misalignment at different levels.
Some common examples of when the practice of the task is misaligned with the performance.