#046 The Ambiguities Of Experience
“Experience may possibly be the best teacher, but it is not a particularly good teacher."
Hello,
Welcome to The Future Of Leadership, a monthly newsletter packed full of leadership wisdom for founders, CEOs and senior technology executives.
Reflective practice is the new deliberate practice was the most clicked link in last month's newsletter.
What I’m reading
Everyone loves a success story. We gobble up biographies of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Podcasts study the great founders and outliers, in order that we can extract the best lessons of their success.
Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, doesn’t do one-on-ones. Without founder mode Brian Chesky couldn’t have grown Airbnb into what it is today. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, then should you do the same?
It’s too easy to assume that by studying success we can replicate it. If we copy what others did well, and avoid what didn’t work, then we can significantly increase our chances of following in their greatness. Unfortunately, reality is far more nuanced.
In his wonderful book The Ambiguities of Experience, former Stanford Professor James G. March (1928-2018) helps us understand this phenomena:
“Experience may possibly be the best teacher, but it is not a particularly good teacher.”
Few ideas are as sacrosanct in contemporary sensibilities as the notion that human beings achieve mastery over their lives through learning from experience. Individuals and organizations try to improve their lots by observing and reacting to their experiences, partly by elementary efforts to reproduce actions associated with success, partly by more elaborate efforts to fit the events of their histories into acceptable causal frames. Experience is venerated; experience is sought; experience is interpreted.
But it turns out that learning from experience isn’t so straightforward. March outlines 4 reasons why:
History is complex - the real causes behind outcomes are often highly complex and intertwined.
History is subject to stochastic uncertainty - experience is often based on weak signals embedded in substantial noise.
Endogeneity and adaptation - the world we observe is not static. Our actions and adaptations change the environment itself, making it difficult to separate the effects of our actions from changes in the world. For example, if a tennis player keeps hitting the ball to the weaker hand of their opponent, this will increase their short term advantage but weaken their long term advantage as the opponent strengthens their weaker hand.
Constructed and limited history - the stories we tell about experience are constructed by participants and observers, often shaped by subjective interpretations and limited by the small number of cases we actually observe (the problem with studying outliers is that the sample size is, by definition, very small).
March’s lesson?
That organizations and individuals frequently make misguided inferences from experience because the properties of experience itself confound learning. What worked for Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang or Brian Chesky may not work for you, because the circumstances, challenges, and environments are never the same.
Should we pay attention to successful others and learn from them? Of course, there’s lessons in everything. But at the same time we should approach their stories of success with scepticism and humility. Rather than seeking formulaic lessons to copy, we should recognize the inherent ambiguities of experience and be wary of drawing direct conclusions from their visible triumphs.
Other resources I shared with clients this month:
What’s going on here, with this human? - “My goal in this essay is to help others make better decisions on a potential hire, business partner, or even life partner as quickly and as accurately as possible. It’s made up of suggested action steps and some of the ruminations that underlie them. At the end I include my own assessment of different personality assessments and some of my go-to interview and reference questions.”
How to Communicate With Love (Even When You’re Mad) - “Is it possible that we don’t know the other’s full story or experience? We begin to tend to another by skilfully listening to what they are saying. Then we broaden our observations to take in the person as a whole. When we open to the experience and vulnerability of the other person, we allow our hearts to soften in response to them.”
What I’m working on
Rider Latham is the Co-founder & CEO at Secret Spa and Solo. Thank you for your testimonial:
Richard is the best kind of sounding board – sharp, grounded, and totally unflappable. He challenges your thinking in a way that clears the fog and sharpens your edge. I always leave sessions clearer, calmer, and more focused on what really matters.
If you’re a founder juggling product, people, and pressure, I would highly recommend.
Until next month,
