Experience rocks, except when it doesn't
Repeated exposure to new situations and tough issues helps leaders generate principles by which to operate. Principles are powerful shortcuts you earn that help you see things more clearly and make decisions and when perfect information is not available. The best leaders have great principles.
Principles lead to the development of playbooks: Playbooks are strategies that you grow comfortable administering and tend to return to. Some leaders (fairly or unfairly) become known by their main playbooks: "She likes to hire her way out of problems", "He uses gross margin as lens for everything", "She goes after new revenue by building more product", “They solve everything by consensus” etc.
To my view, evolving a set of principles and playbooks make you experienced at something: Your principles (hopefully) help you clearly understand a challenge and your playbooks help you confidently apply resources to overcome that challenge. When it works, it's wonderful - experience rocks.
Most folks know that they have to keep evolving, so conscientious leaders with experience tend to be pretty good at refining their principles as they progress. Refining your principles is worth it: You get clearer and calmer about things and you get better at incorporating conflicting or new ideas etc. It seems, however, that the same is not as true for playbooks. In fact, a problem with being experienced is that your playbooks might atrophy without your being aware of it.
If you like being a hammer, then everything is in danger a being a nail to you ... it happens even to the most principled of us hammers.
Experienced people can get used to the feeling of being experienced and it can become a pillar of their self-identity. Your tactics and strategies are an outward reflection of your experience and the instincts they are based on can be hard to unlearn and replace with new ones. It is cognitively and emotionally taxing to do and business is hard enough without adding the burden of tearing apart your brain like you did when you were just starting out. So we tend to hold onto our playbooks - sometimes that is the right thing to do; sometimes it is not.
There is a line companies (and departments for that matter) can cross when they seem to be more in service of defending someone’s playbook, rather than being obsessed with the destination they want to achieve. If the playbook is wrong for the situation, the mission gets fuzzy, the work starts to feel tangential to the goal and progress slows. If this is your playbook we are talking about, then it might be time to pause, go back to your core principles and reassess if your experience is serving everyone as well as it should be.
Vulcan (Latin: Volcānus) is the god of fire, volcanoes, deserts, metalworking, sculpture in ancient Roman religion and myth. He is often depicted with a blacksmith's hammer about to hit something.
