I listened to an interesting podcast the other day (you can find it here). The base idea is that sometimes the best person for the job, especially when the job requires creativity and innovation, is the person with no experience. This is not what you typically see in the workplace. Our approach is usually to find the person with the most experience and put them in charge of the project.
But think about a time where you were thrown in over your head and had to do something you had little or no experience doing. How did you work? You had to ask a lot of questions. You had to do a lot of reading or research on YouTube to get ideas. You had to weigh all of the options and make good decisions then test them to be sure they were right. Wasn’t it a great feeling? Didn’t you feel engaged and excited?
Henry Ford in his book “Today and Tomorrow” mentioned that he never wanted to hire an “expert”. An expert is someone who already knows why things “won’t” work. He liked to put people in positions where the person didn’t know what they were trying to do couldn’t be done. He had more breakthroughs where the inexperienced person found a way where the “experts” couldn’t.
I see this each summer with our interns. We bring in young bright college students (or sometimes high school) and put them on tasks that we haven’t had time to get to but could move us forward. We point them in the right direction and give them access to resources to learn from but largely, they are on their own to figure it out. The tasks usually involve things they have never had experience with. It is always amazing at the end of the summer how much they have accomplished and the things that they have discovered for us.
The issue isn’t weather people are experienced or not, it really has to do with the way we learn. It really has to do with keeping your mind open and not limiting the possibilities based on your past experiences. Our minds tend to use heuristics or pattern matching to make the world easier to absorb. If you start working on something and it is similar to something you’ve done before, your mind will leap to conclusions to make the task easier. This makes the experienced person overlook things that the inexperienced person would need to explore and test.
So maybe, next time you need to tackle a project, try assigning it to someone without experience. It will help them grow and you just might get newer and better ideas in the process.
