Beyond Experience LO14475

Simon Buckingham (go57@dial.pipex.com)
Fri, 25 Jul 97 11:02:49 GMT

The importance of having experience is touted around so much these days
that it deserves close consideration amongst the members of this list. For
instance, many graduates cannot get a job for lack of experience, but
neither can they get experience without prior experience!

Some questions we might like to discuss include:

How important is it for someone to have experience in a world where
tomorrow will not be like today? The world has fundamentally changed from
the old orderly organized world to today's diverse, fast changing
unorganized world.

How necessary is it for people in fast-moving industries such as
communications and technologies to have a few years of experience when
everything has changed in that time: the technology, competition and
customer applications?

Increasingly, given the nature of more chaotic unorganized external
economic environments and the internal downstructured less hierarchical
internal strcutures, the need for experience is a myth perpetuated by 27
year olds to keep 27 year olds from getting ahead.

I think that the need for experience is a relic of the organized
hierarchical world when things did not change much and what happened in
the past was therefore more relevant. The importance of experience is
overstated because the future is not what is used to be.

In today's fast changing world, education is more important than
experience. It is more difficult to unlearn received wisdom that is no
longer relevant than to learn new truths. We need to substitute the need
for experiences with teh need for discoveries because whilst experiences
look back in time, discoveries evoke future-oriented images.

Rgds sincerely Simon Buckingham, buck@dial.pipex.com, author
"unorganization: downstructuring towards collapsible corporations" and
"unorganization: The Business Handbook", www.unorg.com

-- 

Simon Buckingham <go57@dial.pipex.com>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>