Experience. One little word, plenty of depth.

We spend years accumulating it. Some make it their mission to have experience in experience itself. We search for it in the people we look to hire, suppliers or advisers we turn to for guidance. It is, quite easily, associated with knowledge, competence, and above all, good judgement.

There is, after all, something reassuring about knowing what works and what doesn’t based on what came before. It has been tried, tested, refined over months and years. You know what to expect and also what might go wrong so that you can plan and deal with it when it does.

I query, however, whether the very experience that helps us navigate familiar situations can sometimes unwittingly influence what and how we prepare ourselves to think beyond them. Quietly shaping what we trust, what we repeat, and what we expect.

What we trust

Imagine spending the best part of your career mastering a particular technique.

Becoming an expert in its strengths, limitations, the peculiarities that you have worked around. You know what a good result looks like, and which ones deserve another look because they don’t quite seem right.

Then you are introduced to a novel approach. One that is faster, more accurate, possibly even less expensive in the long run.

Two possible emotions: scepticism and curiosity. Sometimes both.

Two possible outcomes: resistance or exploration.

There could well be those who cannot justify the time needed to investigate whether or not there will be improvements and efficiencies through change.

Equally, the person best equipped to recognise the limitations of an established technique may be the person who has been working with it for the past twenty years. They understand the problems that have never been fully resolved and what compromises have been necessary along the way.

They may well be sceptical, but that same experience could allow them to recognise advantages which someone else slightly less familiar with the work would overlook.

For me, that is what makes science so interesting. Testing hypotheses and challenging the boundaries of what we thought was possible. All in a bid to make things better, faster, safer, and more efficient.

What we repeat

There is a guaranteed moment when a particular question can leave a room full of experienced business veterans feeling slightly uncomfortable – or irked. Typically innocently asked by someone who has not been in the business for very long and is eager to learn, apply and improve.

Something along the lines of, “Why do you do it that way?”

Pause. The answers that follow can range from a decision made last strategy session, a sensible explanation based on a decision made fifteen years ago, or nobody quite remembering the why.

Processes, systems and decisions are quirky things. They become established in practice, and then over time become something that no one thinks to question.

The person asking the question may not have a better answer, or any answer. They may not even fully understand the reasons behind the original decision. Sometimes it is the very act of asking the question that creates the opportunity to reconsider something that has been taken for granted for an extended period of time.

Sometimes, the way it has always been done still makes sense. Sometimes, it is in need of a fresh pair of eyes, and an extensive review.

What we expect

I am certainly not advocating that businesses need to continuously question what came before or abandon approaches that work. That would be exhausting and, frankly, counterproductive.

What I am advocating, however, is to pause long enough to question whether the conditions that made something effective before still apply today.

Let’s expand the examples to how we interact with our colleagues and peers. How we determine the competence or capabilities of an entire function.

A marketing team may well be seen by leadership and others by how the function operated historically. What it delivered, how it communicated, the channels that worked. That experience is valid, but it is highly likely to no longer reflect the conditions of today. Similarly, how a marketing team operates in one business will undoubtedly be different to how it operates in another.

A leader whose experience of marketing has largely involved exhibitions, brochures and promotional campaigns may, rather understandably, associate the function primarily with producing those materials. They may not recognise its potential contribution to wider customer understanding or market intelligence.

A brochure was a valuable necessity in the past when Ask Jeeves was still a competitor to Google and finding detailed product information online was far from straightforward and took longer than making a cup of tea. That is not to say that its role or value remains the same today.

Moving beyond what we know

Experience is considered an asset. In almost all cases, I would agree.

Ultimately, experience itself is not a problem. It is exactly having experience that enables us to excel at pattern recognition, make decisions and to avoid repetitive mistakes.

However, when we stop distinguishing between what we have learnt from experience and the assumptions we have formed along the way, we start to introduce challenges for ourselves.

It goes well beyond resistance to change. It is our interpretation of our experience that can become the constraint. Perhaps we should consider experience in how we approach a question rather than in going straight to the answers.

We should leverage our collective experience, one hundred percent. To inform what we do next. Not to determine the boundaries of what we believe to be possible.

Photo credit: Telescope at sunset at Hohe Wand, Austria. Image by Wittholm, Getty Images.