what is experience anyway? 🌱

(4 minute read)

Hi! Welcome to Our Best Work Weekly, a newsletter from Healthy Pour where you'll get weekly tips on creating a healthy workplace, becoming a more compassionate leader, and cultivating a regenerative relationship with work. 

I saw a post on LinkedIn some time ago that I can’t stop thinking about. It was written by Bob Sutton, an organizational psychologist and Stanford Professor. The post explored the pitfalls of having 40+ years of experience in a given role or field—specifically, the potential to fall into entrenched thinking rather than continue to question norms and long-held standards with curiosity and compassion. It’s an excellent read.

However, the part that stuck with me was his quote from his former student, Andrew Hargadon, now a professor at the management school at UC Davis. He said:

"Do you have 20 years of experience? Or the same year of experience 20 times?"

My goodness, does that slap. 

I often encounter leaders who tout these decades of experience as if it means they know best, and this articulated why that consistently rubs me the wrong way. It’s also why I will always push back on recruitment and hiring practices that require a certain number of years of experience in a given field—especially when that field has a history of being problematic or insular.

We also see this in organizational culture: a new hire starts with tons of creative ideas and quickly identifies problems that have gone unnoticed due to their normalization. Except after six months of exposure and entrenchment to a homogenous thinking culture, lack of creativity cultivation, and quiet social pressure to conform, the ideas stop, and systems blindness sets in.

We need to interrogate this bias that conflates years of direct experience with knowing what’s best, especially if we’re hiring managers, because we can learn a lot from people with eclectic, seemingly chaotic, or protean careers. They can integrate diverse experiences into their decision-making and problem-solving strategies. My career has been wildly eclectic, from actor and musician to hospitality professional to psychotherapist to organizational psychologist…but I know with certainty that I work the way I work because of that absolute wealth of experience and exposure to different spaces, communities of practice, and ideologies. I know I see things that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to if my career were more obviously linear.

The reality, though, is regardless of whether someone has had a linear career or not, everyone can get stuck in their thinking. The workplace is very much at a pressure point—one that I think will be documented and studied similarly to the Industrial Revolution, the 8-hour workday, and the assembly line—and we need to innovate and evolve through it. Part of this is seeking out individuals who can think creatively and nimbly (especially if they’re shaping and influencing organizational behavior, systems, and culture), but it mostly certainly requires us to rethink what experience is valid and what isn’t. 

It's worth highlighting that what I’m talking about falls under the umbrella of DEI.

So ask yourself: how does my experience inform my creativity? What is the impact of my working culture on my autonomy to innovate? Am I covertly asked to suppress alternate ways of thinking and problem-solving? Am I stuck in my ways? Does my organization value and cultivate homogenous thinking? 

In other news, check out what Chappel Roan said about developing artists and music labels. As someone who was once in a band signed to a major label and was only paid, like, $2,400 for 2 months of touring and an album, this is extraordinary. Remember: artistic spaces are workplaces, and it’s very icky to think that artists do not deserve care, respect, and protection simply because they make music for us to enjoy instead of collecting a W-2 from some corporate job.

Just something to think about.

See you next Monday!