What has experience taught you?
The answer is likely to be “a lot” -
we’re all learning from experience, all the time,
and because this process is automatic and personal,
we hold the knowledge earned this way in extremely high regard.
We even seek it out in others:
hiring employees based on their experience,
reading books to learn from people’s triumphs and disasters,
soliciting advice from those more experienced than ourselves.
Because lessons learned first-hand have immense and obvious value to us.
Julius Caesar summed it up over 2000 years ago:
“Experience is the teacher of all things.”
But, hold on a second...
ALL things?
What about those times when experience didn’t seem to help much at all?
Nobel-prize-winning economists failing to anticipate financial crashes.
Renowned political pundits making hopelessly inaccurate forecasts.
Industry-leading companies dismissing innovations that later changed the world.
So which is it?
Is experience our most valuable teacher, or...
often irrelevant?
Well, maybe...
It's both.
In 2020 psychologist Robin Hogarth and behavioural scientist Emre Soyer
published “The Myth of Experience”,
a book in which they make the case
that although experience is a powerful teacher,
sometimes it’s teaching us the wrong lessons.
Central to their argument is the difference between what they call
“Kind” and “Wicked” Learning Environments.
For instance, imagine you’re learning to ride a bike.
As you wobble backwards and forwards,
you’re experiencing a constant stream of feedback.
If you overbalance, or brake too hard you can react instantly,
experiencing a direct relationship between actions and consequences.
This is a Kind Learning Environment -
the feedback you’re getting is abundant, immediate and accurate,
making it easy to learn useful lessons.
OK – let’s do that again, but this time with a few differences.
First, you’re wearing a blindfold.
Second, the brakes now take 10 seconds to respond
and third, we’ve made balancing...
a little trickier.
This, as well as being extraordinarily dangerous,
is a “Wicked Learning Environment”:
the feedback you’re getting is incomplete, delayed,
or just plain unreliable, making it much harder to learn from.
Now, clearly this example is ridiculous -
no one would choose to learn in an environment this wicked.
But it turns out that
our ability to judge the ‘wickedness’ of a situation is a big part of the problem.
All the examples we mentioned earlier, when experience was of limited use,
occurred in incredibly complex domains.
But often, the full complexity of those domains isn’t apparent,
and so we believe that what we see is all there is.
In short, we find ourselves in wicked learning environments,
believing them to be kind.
We take in the available feedback, assume we have all the information,
draw conclusions...
and learn the wrong lessons.
Here’s a made-up example.
In January, I invest in a popular electronics firm.
For six months, their performance is so-so, but in July, they rebrand.
What follows is two months of disastrous sales figures,
until October, when they bring on a new CEO.
By November their performance is improving,
and by mid December, it’s the best it’s been all year.
What have my 12 months of investing experience taught me?
One:
Rebrands are risky, and have the potential to run companies into the ground,
and two:
A change of leadership in times of crisis can result in miracle recoveries.
These are reasonable conclusions... in a kind learning environment.
But business is complex; so how can we dig deeper?
According to Hogarth and Soyer, the best way of doing this
is simply by asking two questions about our information:
One: What’s missing?
First, in July there was a worldwide supply-chain issue,
affecting every company in the industry.
Second, the old CEO wasn’t fired, her retirement had been planned for a while.
And finally, if we look at the company’s performance over the last decade,
their sales always fluctuate throughout the year
before peaking in the run-up to Christmas.
Two: What’s irrelevant?
Well, if the downturn in July was caused by problems in the supply-chain,
then the rebrand wasn’t necessarily related
to the poor performance over the summer.
Likewise, the change of leadership wasn’t a response to the dip in sales,
any more than it caused the autumn uptick:
the “miracle recovery” was actually a predictable, annual occurrence.
Simplistic as this investment example might sound,
it demonstrates how easy it can be
to mistake wicked learning environments for kind ones,
and to learn the wrong lessons as a result.
This is a principle we can apply to many aspects of our lives:
We live in a complex world, which means whether we’re making business decisions,
following politics, or even just shopping online,
we often don't have all the information we need to draw reliable conclusions.
But even just knowing this
- that the learning environments we find ourselves in
are usually more wicked than they first appear -
is a huge step towards not falling into that trap.
Learning to assume that things are more complicated than they seem,
and that our past experiences
aren’t always a dependable guide to our future ones,
can prompt us to question the conclusions we’ve drawn,
and search for a more complete picture.
Which could be an essential life skill – one that can help us to
learn more valuable lessons from our experiences day-to-day.