There’s a tendency for new people joining a company to immediately draw from their past and implement the things they’ve seen succeed but there is danger in treating experience as a playbook. It can be introduce prematurely and become too much process at the wrong time. It might not match the context of the new environment and cause more problems.
To avoid these common pitfalls, it’s best to think of past experience as more of a repetoire that is both a way of pattern matching on problems and a catalog of potential remedies. Thinking about the shapes of problems encourages critical thinking about the situation and what is an appropriate thing to try next. This approach is adaptive and error correcting increasing the odds of success in more situations.
Another way to say this is to avoid working with experienced people with a heavy survivorship bias in favor of experienced people that are well practiced fallibilists.
See also:
- Chesterton’s fences exist in leadership and management too