This is the fundamental distinction yes. Performance is about doing something exactly right the first time on the night. Concert musicians, sportspeople, firef

This is the fundamental distinction yes. Performance is about doing something exactly right the first time on the night. Concert musicians, sportspeople, firefighters, surgeons, airline pilots, and military personnel all operate to a greater extent under this kind of constraint. When you are called upon to perform, you need to get it right. So you train and practice and drill to make sure you have all the basics down, and you rehearse and prepare for the specific performance you expect to do next. Knowledge work is specifically work that is not like that. It’s work that will involve evaluating information and making decisions and incorporating novel insights and it doesn’t have to be right first time - there’s room for iteration and experimentation and bouncing ideas around. Now, there are parts of some of those performance oriented jobs that require improvisation and creativity and evaluation on the fly - and there are parts of more knowledge-work jobs that require well drilled fundamentals (think about incident response in software operations). So the reality is these jobs all fall on a spectrum between structured performance and freewheeling discovery. But asking ‘why don’t we rehearse how to do knowledge work?’ is nonsensical, knowledge work is precisely that work that involves incorporating and applying knowledge to do - the only way learn how to do it is by doing it.