“I’ve been a designer for 11 years.” “We’ve been in business for 97 years.” These types of statements are batted around as if they’re meaningful. They are meaningful. They mean you’ve been a designer for 11 years or that you’ve been in business for 97 years. However, beyond that, statements of experience are worthless phrases tossed around with the intent to capitalize on the highly probable assumption that experience equals expertise.
The concept of the value of experience is based on shaky ground. The ground is so shaky that significant levels of experience can be detrimental. High levels of experience are often indicative of, at best, a lack of competence… at worst (but shamefully just as common), a lack of imagination and insight. However, the assumption that experience is considered an accurate barometer of performance causes more harm than the experience itself.
“In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.” -Known as “The Peter Principle”… formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in 1968.
The assumptions surrounding experience are highly conservative. The idea that entrenched individuals are inherently more valuable than new talent completely reinforces the status quo. The idea is industrial age thinking at its most antiquated.
I’m faced with evaluating other humans based on resumes, elevator pitches, and other various spiels from time to time. I’m faced with evaluating companies and brands as well. In almost every case, the default measure is the level of experience. What have you done, and for how long have you been doing it?
The good news is that it’s easy to point out the component that gets ignored to all our detriment… The quality of the experience.
I’ve created this adorable little equation to illustrate how experience is influenced by quality:
E x Q = V or… E (quantitative time units) x Q (qualitative) = V (value)
Let’s go back to our experienced designer and business with almost a century of history…
E (11 years) x Q (designs consisting of Comic Sans over clip art) = Zero Value
E (97 years) x Q (a business that thrived under the direction of its founder but lost its panache when he died and his family took over operations and was then sold to a group of investors and has been experiencing revenue drops averaging 7.6% per year since 1983) = Negative Value to its current owners and diminished value to its customers.
It seems so obvious that experience is nothing without quality, but we are psychologically biased to assume experience equates to value. When we’re looking at a stack of resumes, it’s an easy way to quickly process a lot of information. When we’re subconsciously evaluating messages about products, it satisfies our psychological need to select something that’s “proven.”
It’s really easy to dismiss or overlook the quality of experience. As you picture yourself hiring someone who has 20 years experience in a job that’s core competencies are nearly identical to the employee you’re looking for, try getting that number 20 out of your head. Can you forget about it once its planted? As I picture that situation, I think… okay… I’ll probe more on the quality of the experience. But as the queries and responses are exchanged, I get the feeling that the number is trying very hard to overpower the quality. I start to second guess the responses. Oh… well… she’s probably leaving out some details because she assumes I’ll fill in the gaps. How do you qualitatively evaluate 20 years of experience.
Which brings us to the bad news… It’s impossible to accurately discern the quality variable in the experience equation.
On the surface, this whole thing feels like the “practice makes perfect” conundrum. Anyone who played sports as a kid was bombarded with that phrase. It was beat into us until we knew it to be true. Then one day someone came along and changed the paradigm by telling us “perfect practice makes perfect.” Indeed.
The experience bias in humans is a powerful one. It is worse than overrated, it’s misleading and kills the judgment of those who witness it. We have to maintain awareness and have a strategy developed to combat it in advance.
The next time you’re evaluating someone and they pitch you based on experience, think twice. The next time you want to do something you know you have the skills and passion for, but lack the experience… Ignore the “experience required” rule.
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[...] Moreover, some of the people dispensing the advice to travel without question are themselves traveling because they hadn’t previously developed their own identity and chose the default route. Beware the conflation of experience and expertise. [...]