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. 

Complexity makes learning from experience difficult

Unfortunately, the more complex things get, the harder it is to use our experience to adjust and refine our mental models.  The authors identify three main problems with project managers’ ability to correct their mental models -- their inability to handle time lags, their unwillingness to adjust fallible estimates, and a bias for staying with initial goals.  If you are interested in improving performance of project managers, you can read the entire article here…

The problems with learning that they identify are not unique to project management.  The same issues occur with improving or changing our mental models in leadership and other areas.  Moreover, without expert help and deliberate practice, changing an incorrect mental model is nearly impossible once it is firmly established.  Do you know that about 2/3 of people do not tie their shoes correctly?  If you have ever retied your shoelaces or double knotted them so they do not come untied, then you have a suboptimal mental model for shoe tying.  And, probably no idea of what you are doing wrong or how to change it.

Freeing ourselves from the experience trap

Fortunately, the research on high-level performance provides guidance for addressing the learning problems identified in Sengupta’s study.  First, the fastest way to create good mental models is to start with ones already developed by experts.  The principles of effective leadership that you learn in classroom training are mental models from experts.  You can also use wisdom transfer techniques to learn the mental models of good leaders that you work with.  Second, you must use deliberate practice to make the mental model part of your automatic way of thinking and acting.  Just learning a model in a classroom is of little benefit if you do not practice it until using it on the job is natural and effortless.  Third, if you are having performance problems, you may want to reconsider your mental models.  People are notorious for trying to correct problems by using simply increasing the speed and intensity of their current methods.  I call this the John Henry problem -- you will never be able to swing a hammer fast enough to keep up with a steam engine.  Your mental model may be a hammer in a steam engine world.