When Experience Gets in the Way of Better Thinking

As leaders, experience often means we can see the answer before someone has finished asking the question. Does stepping in with a solution always help?

In this thought-provoking article, our founder John Parker explores why having the answer isn’t always the same as finding the best answer. Drawing on coaching, creative collaboration and a little inspiration from Fawlty Towers, he considers how giving people space to think can lead to better conversations, stronger problem-solving and solutions neither person would have reached alone.

“Oh, leave it to me!”

The danger of having the answer

One of the dangers of experience is that you become very good at answering questions. Someone brings you a problem and, quite often, you have seen something like it before. You can see where it is going. You can probably see a solution.

And there is a little voice in your head saying:

“Oh, leave it to me!”

It feels helpful. It is certainly quicker. And, irritatingly, you may well be right.

But there are two problems with that. The first is the obvious one. “If I continually solve problems for people, they become better at bringing me problems rather than better at solving them.”

The second is rather more interesting.

My answer may not actually be the best answer.

Experience is immensely useful, but it also creates patterns. We recognise a situation, connect it with something we have encountered before and very quickly produce an answer.

That is one of the advantages of experience. It can also be one of its limitations.

John Cleese has talked fascinatingly about this in relation to creative collaboration. In a Harvard Business Review interview, he said that when you work creatively with someone else you can “get to places…you would never get to on your own”. He went further. Sometimes the development of an idea actually depends on a misunderstanding of what the other person has said.

That is a wonderful thought.

One person starts with an idea. It may not be a particularly good idea. The other person hears it differently, responds to what they think was meant and produces another idea. That prompts another thought. The conversation moves backwards and forwards and, eventually, the two people arrive somewhere neither of them had originally intended to go.

Cleese described something similar about writing Fawlty Towers with Connie Booth. He saw himself as strong on structure and inclined to move a script along fairly obvious lines. Booth, he said, “stops me from doing the obvious”. Read the interview extract

Connie Booth has since described how the pair spent around a month developing the plot of each episode before Cleese wrote the dialogue. The finished product emerged from that extended process of thinking together. Read more

There is a useful leadership lesson in that.

A coaching conversation is sometimes presented as though the experienced manager has to suppress everything they know and patiently wait while somebody else discovers the answer.

I don’t think that is quite right.

I may already have a half-formed solution in my head. The other person may have one too. The opportunity lies in using questions, challenge, experience and curiosity to shape those starting ideas into something better.

• Not my answer.
• Not your answer.
• Perhaps our better answer.

That means experience still matters. It gives us judgement, pattern recognition and a bank of previous successes and failures to draw upon.

The danger comes when experience closes the conversation rather than enriches it. So I increasingly think:

Your first answer is always best treated as a starting hypothesis, not the final answer.

There will, of course, be times when the answer really is “leave it to me”. Leadership sometimes requires a clear decision, instruction or intervention.

But when there is room to think, three things are worth remembering.

• Experience should inform the conversation, not close it down.
• Solving every problem for people may make today easier, but it does little to build their judgement for tomorrow.
• And the purpose of a good coaching conversation is not simply to help someone else reach an answer. It is to improve the quality of the thinking itself.

In doing so, you might just discover the answer that neither of you had thought or even dreamed of – YET.

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