Experience is Good, Right?

It sounds outrageous but, often, veteran project managers do not produce high caliber results BECAUSE of their experience.  A recent article by Kishore Sengupta, et. al. in the Harvard Business Review shows there is something wrong with the way managers learn from their experience, especially in complex, dynamic environments.  The authors conclude, “Despite their experiences with complex projects, veteran managers do not meaningfully improve the mental models they have formed in simpler contexts.”  Mental models are hypothesis about how things work and assumptions about cause and effect that we develop over time and then use to guide our decisions and actions.  Experience creates problems for performance when our mental models are wrong.