The importance of experience

I just completed Bent Flyvbjerg's How Big Things Get Done. He talks about the importance in project planning of experimentation and experience, captured in the Latin word experiri. 

This about the importance of experience in successful project execution (and a lot else) 

But as the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi showed, much of the most valuable knowledge we can possess and use isn’t like that; it is “tacit knowledge.” We feel tacit knowledge. And when we try to put it into words, the words never fully capture it. As Polanyi wrote, “We can know more than we can tell... Highly experienced project leaders like Frank Gehry and Pete Docter overflow with tacit knowledge about the many facets of the big projects they oversee. It improves their judgment profoundly. Often, they will feel that something is wrong or that there is a better way without quite being able to say why. As a large research literature shows, the intuitions of such experts are, under the right conditions, highly reliable. They can even be astonishingly accurate.. This is “skilled intuition,” not garden-variety gut feelings, which are unreliable. It is a powerful tool available only to genuine experts—that is, people with long experience working in their domain of expertise...

When Aristotle discussed the nature of wisdom more than 2,300 years ago, he didn’t scorn the knowledge we get from classrooms and textbooks. It is essential, he said. But practical wisdom, the wisdom that enables a person to see what’s right to do and get it done, requires more than explicit knowledge; it requires knowledge that can be gained only through long experience—a view supported by Michael Polanyi and a great deal of psychological research 2,300 years later. As previously mentioned, that practical wisdom is what Aristotle called “phronesis.” He held it in higher regard than any other virtue, “for the possession of the single virtue of phronesis will carry with it the possession of them all [i.e., all the relevant virtues],” as he emphasized.

He describes the importance of experience in the success of several important large projects.

Experience is what elevates the best project leaders—people like Frank Gehry and Pete Docter—above the rest. And in both planning and delivery, there is no better asset for a big project than an experienced leader with an experienced team. How does experience make people better at their jobs? Ask someone that question, and you’ll likely hear that with experience people know more. That’s true as far as it goes... When a highly experienced project leader uses a highly iterative planning process—what I earlier called “Pixar planning”—good things happen... the process of building the Disney Concert Hall taught Gehry a host of lessons that he used in building the Guggenheim Bilbao and has used in projects ever since. Who has power, and who doesn’t? What are the interests and agendas at work? How can you bring on board those you need and keep them there? How do you maintain control of your design? These questions are as important as aesthetics and engineering to the success of a project. And the answers can’t be learned in a classroom or read in a textbook because they are not simple facts that can be put fully into words. They need to be learned as you learn to ride a bike: try, fail, try again. That was what Gehry did and Utzon didn’t. One had built experience, the other had not.

The importance of experience arises from its role in people's ability to exercise good judgement. It's about phronesis, the ability to exercise good practical judgement, the highest intellectual virtue as per Aristotle. 

A simple theory of knowledge processing I have found useful is that it has three parts - learnt knowledge, lived life, and lived career. The first is the theoretical and the second and third are experiential knowledge. The Aristotlean phronesis emerges from an interaction of the theoretical and experiential knowledge. You need a combination of the three to process knowledge, understand the world, and make good judgements. 

The importance of practical wisdom increases with the complexity of the issue being examined. And there are few more complex issues in the world than policy making and implementation on development and economic growth. As I blogged here, decision making in development contexts is invariably about the exercise of judgement. Good judgement is the difference between success and failure. 

From this aforementioned perspective, international development discourse has a fundamental problem. It elevates theoretical knowledge as superior and discounts experiential knowledge. It also elevates the knowledge of the sayers and discounts that of the doers. I have blogged about the sayer-doer dissonance in development,

The sayers are informed by their knowledge of the why and what ought to be done, the concepts and theoretical frameworks of the issue. The doers are informed by their judgement of what is possible and doable given the circumstances. Each side understand their role and acknowledge it. The sayers draw on their concepts and analytical frameworks to supply the inputs which the doers can apply in their decision making. The doers screen the inputs from the sayers by drawing on countless insights and data points from their practical experience, and thereby exercise good judgement in their decisions. 

The sayers acknowledge the limitations and narrowness of their knowledge, the absence of insights and data points gathered from the experience of a lived life. This gives them an epistemic humility... The acknowledgement of role distinction comes from their respective expertises and perspectives. The sayer's expertise is largely theoretical. The doer's is experiential, the lived experience of doing things. The sayer has the comfort and luxury of working in sanitised environments - contemplating, theorising, designing and experimenting. The doer has to respond to the issue in real-time and based on a multitude of emerging contexts and scenarios. It's accepted that the doers will apply their judgement to the outputs of sayers and tailor their responses accordingly. It's therefore also accepted that these responses will sometimes incorporate the inputs from the sayers, sometimes modify them, and sometimes reject them. It's considered the normal course of things in their respective areas. Flawed judgements by the doers are assumed to be part of the deal.

The development experts and the discourse framed by them offer no such leeway to its practitioners. Instead, the entire debate tends to get side-tracked into one between experts and generalists, where the latter are considered of inferior quality and expected to take the advice offered by experts and implement them unconditionally. This view gets reinforced by the dominant narrative about the inefficiencies and incompetence of governments, politicians and bureaucrats.

This feature of international development discourse is interesting since there is a clear distinction between the sayers and doers in all other fields. The sports coach, management guru, research team of fund management house, and election campaign manager acknowledge their advisory role and leave the execution to the phronesis of the sportsperson, chief executive, fund manager, and politician respectively.

Update 1 

This is a great illustration of the difference between knowledge and experience.