I respect experience. There is value in working through difficult problems and staying responsible for the results. When something goes wrong, I appreciate having someone beside me who has dealt with trouble before.
Still, the number of years we have done something tells only part of the story. What did those years teach us? Where did our judgment improve? What do we handle differently because of what we have been through?
Those are questions I have to ask of myself, too.
A Lesson From the Packing List
During my time in the Army, the schools I attended included a familiar routine. We emptied our bags and held up the items on the packing list. Missing required items could get you sent home. Having extra items could do the same.
You had to bring what the list required. Whatever experience you arrived with, you still had to demonstrate that you were prepared.
It is a simple memory, but one that gives me something useful to think about today. Going through an inspection could teach a person to check the requirements carefully before packing. It could also become another story about an irritating requirement. The same experience offered both possibilities.
The value depended on what you carried forward.
I think about that when experience becomes a reason to skip a basic step. We recognize the situation, so we assume we understand the requirements. We have handled something similar, so we stop checking whether anything has changed.
That old packing-list inspection gives me a practical question to ask in leadership: What am I assuming I have covered simply because I have done this before?
Years Do Not Do the Work for Us
Time gives us opportunities to learn. We still have to do something with them.
A manager can spend years holding meetings without learning to listen when someone disagrees. A parent can have the same argument repeatedly without examining whether the way the conversation starts contributes to the way it ends.
Repetition can make a behavior feel normal. Once that happens, we may become better at explaining it than examining it. We know our reasons. We can describe the pressure we were under. We remember what everyone else should have done.
Honest reflection asks us to stay with the experience a little longer. What did I misunderstand? What did I leave unclear? Was there information I dismissed because it did not fit what I already believed?
Those questions can be uncomfortable, especially when we take pride in being capable. They also give us something useful to work on. We cannot change a decision we already made, but we can understand it well enough to make the next one more carefully.
Be Careful What You Learn
We can also take the wrong lesson from a real experience.
Suppose we hand someone a responsibility and the work goes poorly. We might decide that delegating never works and that we should do everything ourselves. That conclusion may feel justified, particularly when we are the person left fixing the problem.
A closer look might reveal that the assignment was vague, the deadline was unrealistic, or the person needed support we never discussed. The useful lesson could be to define the work more clearly and check progress sooner.
Sometimes that closer look will confirm that the other person did not follow through. Learning does not require accepting blame for everything. It requires understanding our part accurately, including the limits of what we could control.
Success deserves examination as well. A good result can hide a weak process. Someone may have quietly rescued the work, or favorable circumstances may have covered an assumption that could fail next time.
Before we turn an outcome into a rule, we owe ourselves a careful look at how it happened.
Put the Lesson to Work
Eventually, learning has to show up in what we do.
If a project suffered because nobody knew who owned the next step, the next project should begin with clear responsibilities. If a conversation went badly because we were preparing our response instead of listening, the next conversation is an opportunity to slow down and hear the person out.
The adjustment does not have to be dramatic. It might be a question asked earlier, a written expectation, or a decision to get another perspective before moving ahead.
It also helps to ask someone who experienced the situation alongside us. Our own account will always be incomplete. Another person may remember a warning we overlooked or explain how our words landed differently than we intended.
Then we have to pay attention to whether the adjustment helped. Changing a habit takes practice, and our first attempt at improving it may need work too.
This is where experience starts becoming useful to the people around us. They can see that a previous difficulty has changed how we approach the next one.
Stay Willing to Be Taught
There is a point at which experience can make us reluctant to ask a basic question. We worry that someone will think we should already know the answer.
I would rather ask the question than carry an avoidable misunderstanding into a decision that affects other people. Being responsible for a team makes that willingness more necessary. The people depending on us need sound judgment, and sound judgment includes knowing when to check.
Experience can help us recognize familiar ground. We still need to notice when the conditions have changed or when another person sees something we missed.
When I think back to those Army inspections, I come back to preparation. Having been there before gave us a chance to arrive better prepared the next time. That is a reasonable expectation to carry into the rest of life.
The question I want to keep asking myself is simple: What am I doing differently because of what I have learned?