Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
Experience helps us recognize patterns, make informed decisions and interpret complex situations, but it can also lead us to rely on familiar explanations without recognizing what makes a situation different. The value of expertise lies not only in what we know, but in our willingness to question our assumptions, examine new evidence and recognize when our understanding may be incomplete.
Experience is generally regarded as one of our greatest professional assets.
We spend years acquiring knowledge, developing skills, refining our judgement and learning to recognize patterns that may not be immediately apparent to others. Over time, we become more confident in our ability to assess situations, make decisions and recommend appropriate courses of action. But what happens when the very experience we rely on begins to limit what we’re capable of seeing?
In a LinkedIn post exploring systems thinking, Karrie Sullivan recommended Donella Meadows’ book, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, while offering an interesting perspective on what it takes to develop the capacity to understand complex systems. Her argument went beyond intelligence and knowledge, suggesting that effective systems thinking also requires us to examine and question our established ways of thinking. She suggested that we may also need to unlearn established ways of responding to the world, including patterns developed much earlier in life.
I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as suggesting that childhood coping mechanisms determine our capacity for systems thinking. However, her observation raises an important question about how our experiences shape the way we interpret what happens around us.
Could the knowledge and experience that make us effective also prevent us from recognizing when our understanding is incomplete or no longer appropriate?
When Familiarity Influences What We See
Experience allows us to recognize patterns. An experienced manager may recognize operational issues that aren’t immediately apparent to others, while a business advisor may draw on experience across different organizations to identify early signs of misalignment.
This ability to recognize patterns is valuable. It enables us to make connections, anticipate potential difficulties and respond without having to investigate every situation entirely from the beginning. Recognizing familiar patterns can also lead us to make assumptions about what we’re observing.
When we encounter something that resembles a previous experience, we may begin interpreting it through what we already know. We recognize familiar characteristics, recall what worked before and develop an explanation based on those similarities. Sometimes we’re right. At other times, the similarities may conceal important differences.
A leader who has successfully improved performance through tighter accountability may assume that declining results in another department require the same response. An advisor whose experience has demonstrated the value of restructuring may be inclined to interpret recurring operational problems as evidence of structural weaknesses. Both interpretations may be valid, but their relevance needs to be established by examining the circumstances rather than relying on similarities with previous experiences.
Familiarity can help us recognize what is happening while also influencing what we overlook.
When Expertise Becomes an Assumption
The more experienced we become, the easier it can be to mistake our interpretation of a situation for an accurate understanding of it. After all, our judgement has been developed through years of observation, experimentation and practical experience. We’ve seen what works, what fails and what tends to happen under particular circumstances. Even extensive experience doesn’t guarantee that we fully understand every situation we encounter.
Every organization operates within its own circumstances. Leadership practices, employee relationships, customer expectations, operating structures and market conditions influence how problems emerge and how people respond to them. Two organizations may experience similar symptoms while the conditions responsible for those symptoms are entirely different.
High employee turnover, for example, may be connected to compensation in one organization, management practices in another or limited opportunities for development in a third. An experienced professional may recognize the symptoms immediately, but recognizing the symptoms doesn’t establish why they’re occurring.
Expertise can sometimes lead us to reach conclusions with greater confidence than the available evidence justifies.
The Discipline of Questioning What We Know
One of the principles highlighted in Sullivan’s post was the importance of remaining humble when working with complex systems. Even experienced practitioners cannot anticipate every consequence or understand every relationship influencing an outcome.
I think this is particularly relevant to leadership and advisory work.
Professional expertise should enable us to ask better questions, interpret evidence and recognize possibilities that others may not see…but it should also help us recognize the limitations of our own knowledge. That requires a willingness to examine the assumptions guiding our interpretations.
- What have we accepted as true because it has been true before?
- What evidence might contradict our initial understanding?
- Are we examining the circumstances as they actually exist, or interpreting them through a familiar model of how we believe they should operate?
These questions don’t diminish the value of experience. They help ensure that experience informs our judgement without determining our conclusions prematurely.
There’s also an important difference between being willing to learn something new and being willing to reconsider something we already believe we know.
The latter can be considerably more demanding, particularly when those beliefs have contributed to years of professional success.
Knowing When Experience Is No Longer Enough
Organizations frequently seek experienced leaders, consultants and advisors because they want access to knowledge and judgement developed elsewhere, but the value of that expertise shouldn’t be measured solely by how quickly someone recognizes a problem or proposes a solution.
Sometimes the greatest contribution an experienced professional can make is recognizing that a familiar situation may require a different explanation.
An advisor who has developed considerable expertise in organizational restructuring may discover that the problem has little to do with structure. A leader accustomed to directing decisions may recognize that greater employee autonomy would produce better results.
In both cases, their expertise remains valuable, but their judgement is informed by a deeper understanding of the circumstances.
Experience becomes particularly valuable when we can draw upon what we know without allowing it to prevent us from discovering what we don’t.
Expertise is most valuable when we remain willing to examine what we believe we know, particularly when new information challenges our understanding.
Our greatest blind spots may lie not in what we don’t know, but in the assumptions we’ve become so accustomed to accepting that we no longer question them.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
When examining a problem, how willing are you to question whether your experience is helping you understand what’s happening or leading you toward conclusions based on what you’ve encountered before?
I’m Giselle Hudson, The Pre-Fixer™.
For nearly three decades, I’ve worked with business owners and leaders across the Caribbean who carry important decisions largely on their own, often when problems keep returning, solutions fall short, or implementation stalls.
When I ask business owners what problem they can’t seem to solve, the answer is usually “people.” So I ask them to tell me more, because people and businesses are rarely as simple as they first appear.
I help them understand what’s really causing the problem before they spend more trying to fix it. And where needed, I help design the solution and guide their teams to put it into practice.
Get Clarity before the Fix.
What are you trying to make sense of right now?