The experience trap - Is there any way out?

Tony Austin
Friday, 14 March 2008 10:30

Opinion and Analysis

Two professors question the value of experience in project managers, revealing what they call the 'experience trap' -- making the same mistakes over and over again. Will we ever learn?

Being involved in a short software development project late in 2007 got me thinking hard again about what makes any given project successful or otherwise.

In a recent INSEAD interview, professors Kishore Sengupta and Luk Van Wassenhove say that their research has revealed the ‘experience trap’ as they call it.

“Conventional wisdom holds that as we do more things more often, we learn from experience and get better and better, and what we found in our research was that actually some of it may not be the case,” Sengupta says.

In their research, they found that experienced managers applied the wrong lessons, didn’t link the right lessons with outcomes or were given erroneous objectives or unhelpful feedback. It all adds up to extra problems in project management.

“Managers tend to learn the wrong lessons and apply them again and again in a way that’s fundamentally counter-productive,” Sengupta says.

“These things are deeply engrained into their experience,” Van Wassenhove says.  “You have to help them unlearn what they’ve learnt and give them tools so they can avoid these types of mistakes.”

"A common mistake is in starting a project with one goal or one budget; and then when some of the variables change, as they always do in projects, managers decide to add staff but they fail to take into account time lags in hiring and training people, and projects end up late and over-budget."  This is particularly true in software development, but Sengupta and Van Wassenhove say the lessons are widely applicable.

"And managers don’t get the right feedback either. They get lots of reports and information, but it’s not always very insightful and doesn’t connect actions with outcomes."

If you haven't looked at any INSEAD reports before, you should (if nothing else, for what impresses me as a distinctive European and Asian flavor).

If you're in any way involved with non-trivial projects, you owe it to yourself to listen to the INSEAD interview MP3 audio or watch the MP4 video

There's also this Harvard Business Review article stem (you have to be a subscriber to HBR to read the full report).

Does this interview resonate with you, too? Are you currently involved in any project which is heading towards (or has already fallen into) this trap?