WORK CULTURE. Experience is not always wisdom

We rely on the weight of experience to make judgments and decisions. We interpret the past – what we’ve seen and what we’ve been told – to chart a course for the future, secure in the wisdom of our insights. After all, didn’t our ability to make sense of what we’ve been through get us where we are now? It’s reasonable that we go back to the same well to make new decisions.

It could also be a mistake.

Experience seems like a reliable guide, yet sometimes it fools us instead of making us wiser.

The problem is that we view the past through numerous filters that distort our perceptions. As a result, our interpretations of experience are biased, and the judgments and decisions we base on those interpretations can be misguided.

If our goal is to improve decision-making, we can use our knowledge of those filters to understand just what our experience has to teach us and learn how to overcome our biases.

In the business environment, the outcomes of decisions are highly visible, readily available for us to observe and judge. But the details of the decision process, which we can control far more than the result, typically don’t catch our attention. If the aim is to learn from experience – mistakes as well as successes – acknowledging that process is crucial.

Honest feedback – an unbiased, undistorted assessment of one’s experience – is essential for improving decisions. Yet decision makers are often surrounded by individuals who have incentives to feed them censored and self-serving information – and these people are not necessarily a crowd of yes-men.

We can’t place all the blame for our distorted view of the world on the environment and our inner circle. Some of the blame lies with us. We tend to search for and use evidence that confirms our beliefs and hypotheses, and we gloss over or ignore information that contradicts them – an exercise of selectively building and interpreting experience known as the confirmation bias.

The following techniques can uncover the real lessons experience offers and help you base decisions on a clearer view of the world.

Sample failure: Failures and the processes that lead to them are doomed to stay in the dark unless special occasions are created to bring them to light. To identify what could be done better in the future, companies can also conduct decision post-mortems to analyse underlying processes.

Don’t miss near misses: Another oft-ignored event is the near miss – a failure that’s disguised as a success, but only because there are generally no dire consequences.

Pursue prevention: Recognising a potential problem requires a different approach than solving an actual problem. One strategy is to harness employees’ collective talents by allowing people to raise concerns about the firm’s operations. Disagree: As Peter Drucker wrote, “The first rule in decision making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.” To devise healthy strategies, executives need to hear many perspectives.

Disconfirm: Rather than finding clues that corroborate your hunch – all too easy in an information-rich world – start by asking yourself how you could know you were, in fact, wrong.

(Emre Soyer is an assistant professor at Özyegin University, in Istanbul; Robin M. Hogarth is an emeritus professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona)

HBR/NYT Syndicate

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