Sometimes we see problems through the lens of age or skill, when the real issue is experience.
Previously, I wrote about Tony Popovic’s dilemma: Do you back the experienced veteran, or the rookie who is in outstanding form?
Just before the penalty shootout against Egypt, Popovic substituted Patrick Beach for veteran goalkeeper Mat Ryan.
It didn’t work. Ryan didn’t save a penalty. Australia lost.
Within minutes, people were asking: Why did Popovic make the change?
If Ryan doesn’t save a penalty, then bringing him on was obviously the wrong decision.
There were further questions about 18-year-old Lucas Herrington taking a penalty. He missed.
Was Herrington too young?
Critics said Herrington was too young and lacked the experience for that moment. But he didn’t miss because he was 18; he missed because no amount of training fully prepares you for your first penalty in a World Cup shootout.
That’s not an age problem or a skill problem. It’s an experience problem, and it’s one you can only solve by having been there before.
I wonder whether we’re confusing three different things: age, experience and skill.
They’re all related, but they’re not the same.
Before the penalties began, nobody knew what was going to happen. Coach Popovic had to make a judgement call facing this uncertainty.
His reasoning was simple: Mat Ryan had experienced these moments before.
He had a history of saving penalties, and Popovic believed that experience gave Australia a better chance.
In that moment, he wasn’t claiming that Ryan would save penalties, but his experience made it a better bet.
When we’re making decisions about the future, we’re always betting on what we think is the best option.
Does Experience Guarantee Success?
I think we often give experience magical powers. We think it will somehow guarantee success.
But it doesn’t. And it doesn’t even help us eliminate the uncertainty of what lies ahead. It simply helps us find our way forward.
The experienced leader still makes mistakes.
The experienced surgeon still loses patients.
The experienced investor still backs companies that fail.
The experienced coach still loses football matches.
Experience improves our judgement, but it doesn’t control the future.
Making Decisions in Real-Time
This is where I think we fool ourselves: after the outcome is known, certainty arrives. We can look backwards, and every decision feels obvious. Of course, we’d have done that!
But leaders never get to make decisions looking backwards; they always make them looking forwards whilst under pressure and with incomplete information.
That’s why judging a decision purely by its outcome can be misleading. Sometimes a good decision leads to a poor result, and sometimes a poor decision gets rewarded.
The quality of our judgement isn’t always revealed by the outcome.
The more I explore experience, the less I think it’s about certainty. Yes, it changes what we notice, and it gives us a richer way of interpreting a situation, but it can never remove the uncertainty of what hasn’t happened yet.
Experience helps us make better bets about what to do, and that may be exactly why it remains valuable. And that’s not because it predicts the future, but because it helps us respond more wisely to an unknowable one.
When have you made what you still believe was the right decision, even though the outcome suggested otherwise?
More Field Notes
This is Field Note #4. Field Notes are observations from my ongoing enquiry into experience. To learn more about how to make the most of your experience, read these posts next:
- What a Shark Attack taught me about Experience
- What a Designer taught me about Experience
- What Trainspotting taught me about Experience
