When Your Experience Becomes the Problem

After 30 years in business, I have learned that one of the hardest problems to solve is not a lack of knowledge, but having enough knowledge and experience to become convinced that you already understand the problem. That may sound like a contradiction, but anyone who has spent enough time in business knows exactly what I mean. When something is not working, the owner usually has an explanation. He knows what happened, why it happened, who was involved, what the market is doing, what the customer is doing, what the economy is doing, and what needs to happen next. He has probably dealt with something similar before, and that previous experience gives him confidence in his conclusion. Sometimes that confidence is justified. Sometimes it is the very thing preventing him from seeing what is actually happening.

This is one of the reasons difficult business problems cannot always be solved by simply finding another strategy. A strategy is only useful when you have correctly identified the problem it is supposed to solve. I have watched businesses change pricing when the real problem was that nobody understood the value of the offer, change employees when the real problem was the way the business was being led, spend more money on marketing when the real problem was that the underlying proposition was weak, add new systems when the real problem was that nobody was using the systems already in place, and chase new opportunities because the existing business was not producing the desired result without ever stopping to ask whether the way the business had been built was capable of producing that result in the first place. The owner was not necessarily lazy or incompetent. In many cases, the opposite was true. He was experienced, intelligent, determined, and accustomed to solving problems. The difficulty was that he was trying to solve the problem he had identified rather than the problem that actually existed.

That distinction is important because experience should improve your ability to see, not eliminate your willingness to look again. The longer you have been in business, the more patterns you recognize, and that is valuable. You should not throw away thirty years of experience and pretend that someone who has been in business for six months sees the world more clearly than you do. But experience becomes a liability when it stops being a source of insight and becomes the reason you refuse to question your own conclusion. You begin to assume that because you have seen something before, you understand what is happening now. You trust your instincts because they have served you well. You trust your judgment because you have made good decisions for years. Eventually, without making any conscious decision to do so, you can move from using your experience to leaning upon it.

That is where the biblical issue begins.

Proverbs 3:5 says, "Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding." We tend to read that as though it is written primarily for people who do not know what they are doing, but that is not what it says. It does not tell the inexperienced person to trust God while the experienced person is free to trust himself. It does not say to lean on God when you are uncertain and lean on your own understanding when you are confident. It says not to make your own understanding the thing you ultimately depend upon. That is a very different instruction, particularly for someone who has spent decades becoming very good at understanding things.

There is nothing wrong with confidence. A business leader should be capable of making decisions. He should have enough knowledge to recognize an opportunity, enough courage to act on it, and enough experience to understand that every decision carries consequences. The problem is not confidence in what you have learned. The problem is believing that what you have learned makes you incapable of being wrong. There is a difference between saying, "I have seen this before, and here is what my experience tells me," and saying, "I have seen this before, so I already know what this is." The first leaves room for examination. The second closes the door before the examination begins.

That is why one of the most useful questions a business owner can ask when something is not working is not, "What should I do?" but, "What am I not seeing?" That question changes the posture of the person asking it. Instead of immediately reaching for another tactic, you start looking at the situation again. Instead of defending the explanation you have already formed, you become willing to discover that your explanation may be incomplete. Instead of searching for someone or something to blame, you begin looking for the condition that is actually producing the result. Sometimes that will confirm what you already believed. Sometimes it will completely change your understanding of the situation. Either way, you are now examining the problem rather than protecting your conclusion.

That is particularly important because a business owner is rarely an objective observer of his own business. You have money invested in it, years invested in it, relationships invested in it, and a reputation attached to it. You have made sacrifices to build it, and you have probably made decisions that you believed were right at the time. When someone challenges the way the business operates, it can feel like they are challenging you personally because, in many ways, the business has become an extension of your identity. That makes it difficult to look at the business without defending it, and it makes it even more difficult to consider that something you personally decided may now be part of the problem.

But a problem does not become less real because you created it.

That is one of the hardest things for an experienced leader to accept. Sometimes the decision that needs to be examined is your own. Sometimes the process that is failing is one you designed. Sometimes the person who needs to change is not the employee, the customer, the market, or the competition, but the person sitting at the top of the organization. That does not mean the leader is incompetent. It means leadership requires enough honesty to examine yourself with the same degree of scrutiny you apply to everyone else.

This becomes even more important when faith is involved because Christians have another form of self-confidence that can be difficult to recognize. We can become so familiar with Scripture that we assume we already understand it. We can become so accustomed to praying that we stop listening. We can become so experienced in our faith that we begin deciding what God must be doing before we have actually taken the time to seek Him. We can say that we trust God while making every important decision from our own understanding and then asking Him to bless what we have already decided.

That is not dependence. It is independence with Christian language attached to it.

The same problem can show up in business. A Christian business owner can sincerely believe that God gave him his abilities while operating as though those abilities make God's direction unnecessary. He can pray for a business to succeed while never asking whether the direction he is taking is actually right. He can call himself a steward while treating the business as though it exists primarily to satisfy his own ambition. He can talk about biblical principles while making the final decision according to whatever produces the greatest financial return. The issue is not whether he believes in God. The issue is whether that belief actually has authority over the decisions he makes.

That is where the difference between Christian business and simply owning a business as a Christian becomes clear.

If God is actually Lord over the business, then His authority has to reach the decisions that are difficult, expensive, inconvenient, and personally painful. It has to reach the contract you want but should not sign, the customer you want but should not keep, the opportunity that could make you a great deal of money but requires you to compromise, the employee you would rather protect than confront, and the decision that makes financial sense but does not make biblical sense. It is easy to claim that God is in control when everything you want is happening. The real question is whether you are willing to allow His Word to overrule what you want when the two come into conflict.

That is where experience and self-reliance can become especially dangerous. The more capable you become, the more opportunities you have to believe that you can solve the problem yourself. The more successful you become, the more evidence you have that your judgment works. The more people depend upon you, the easier it becomes to forget that you are supposed to depend upon God. You can reach a point where your competence becomes the very thing that prevents you from recognizing your dependence.

I do not believe the answer is to become less confident or less capable. The answer is to become more discerning about where that confidence belongs. Your experience is valuable, but it is not infallible. Your judgment matters, but it is not absolute. Your instincts may be excellent, but they are not authority. Your ability to build something significant is a gift, not evidence that you are self-sufficient. You can use everything you have learned over thirty years and still be willing to admit that there are things you do not see.

That willingness is not weakness. It is one of the clearest signs that experience has actually made you wiser.

The leader who thinks he has nothing left to learn is already in trouble. The leader who knows that he can be wrong is still capable of being corrected. The leader who can step back from his own business, his own decisions, his own assumptions, and even his own successes long enough to ask what he may be missing has given himself an opportunity to see what confidence would have hidden.

That is why the Christian business leader should pay particular attention to the moments when he feels most certain that he has everything under control. Those are not necessarily the moments when he is strongest. They may be the moments when he is most vulnerable, because certainty can make you stop asking questions, stop listening, stop seeking counsel, and eventually stop depending upon God.

The greatest problem is not that you do not know enough.

It may be that you know enough to convince yourself you do not need to look again.