Thank goodness the election is over because I’m bored with all this talk about whether experience really matters. The answer is just too obvious. Experience doesn’t matter.

(This is a longer-than-usual newsletter because ‘getting’ experience takes time. For those of you who don’t have the time, you may stop reading now. You have already made my point.)

Experience doesn’t matter... unless the consequences of inexperience matter more.

Think about it this way. You need brain surgery; you may choose one of two available surgeons; both are highly qualified, but only one has performed this operation many times before. Do you really need to be a brain surgeon yourself to make the right choice?

Clearly, experience matters when outcomes matter. However, there is another instance when experience is critical, one that is often ignored by our dear leaders. Experience matters when your decisions will impact on other people.

I once read a bumper sticker that stated "good judgment is the result of experience; experience is the result of bad judgments."

Exactly. But please keep in mind that you don’t have the right to acquire experience by practicing your bad judgments on others.

Of course, at work your decisions do impact on others. So... when it comes to making these decisions, do you go on intuition and gut feel or do you deliberate and evaluate?

No doubt, intuition and gut feel can be effective in deciding how and when to act. But they should not be the only way you make decisions, especially decisions that impact on others.

Decisions concerning strategy-making and strategy-execution require more skills than basic instinct. These additional skills are really not acquired in lecture halls and text books. They are acquired through trial and error; by understanding what worked when and why; by learning over time and over many successes and failures. In other words, through practical application, again and again.

We have a collective name for these additional skills. We call it experience.

Intuition and gut-feel work surprisingly well when based on real, practical experience. However, if you have not yet accumulated a wealth of experience, better to leave your intuition and gut-feel at home, before you hurt others at work.

But what if you don’t have time for experience because you are in a hurry on the path to wisdom? Then I suggest you read bumper stickers. Here’s my favorite one about experience. "My old man shouts, ‘You should listen to my 58 years of experience!’ But what he had was one year of experience repeated 58 times."

That nicely sums up the risk you take in assuming that experience automatically improves with age. Old experience might not help as new things happen. The trick lies in understanding which old experience has practical application today. The same applies when you bank on ‘experience’ gained through reading and observing. You lack the practical understanding to know what vicarious experience is relevant to your current situation.

Without practical understanding, you won’t have the savvy to see patterns in all the information around you. And if you don’t see patterns, you can’t make sense of critical events.

Practical understanding comes from direct experience. Direct experience is learning through action. That’s why experience is defined as the practical acquaintance with facts or events.

And wisdom? Wisdom is the ultimate outcome of an accumulation of practical understandings... if you are lucky enough to survive your own direct experiences.

On the other hand, some of us are intuitively savvy enough to side-step risky experiences by tapping the wisdom of others.

Feedback? If you think I don't have the wisdom to write nonsense, please tell me what experience you lack to make such a bad judgment - james@nonsenseatwork.com

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© 2008 James Henry McIntosh - All rights reserved