Does everyone get an equal chance to fail?
The problem with looking at years of experience. Seeking views on child seats in taxis.
Welcome to Ideothetic Flow! A passion project where I share my reflections on being a better person and building a kinder world.
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Hi!
Personal updates.
I have taken on a side project looking at a possible change of law for child seats to be compulsory in taxis (currently they are compulsory on all other vehicles). If you have any views or experiences on this topic please reach out and share!
Alcina and I took some time last weekend to volunteer at a free LPA application and certification event. The general public still lacks understanding on the benefits of a LPA, the exact legal effect, and how to complete the formalities. For my lawyer friends, do take some time to explain these to your extended families when you get the chance to make sure their legal affairs are protected.
Does everyone get a fair chance to fail?
'Failing up': Why some climb the ladder despite mediocrity - A discussion about how workplaces evaluate and promote based on wrong metrics, such as overconfidence, or worse, similarities in race or gender. The worrying consequence is that some people have a privilege to experiment, take risks, and fail without heavy penalties. Others may only get one chance to prove themselves, and their progress is stalled once they suffer a small setback. This exacerbates inequality and distorts meritocracy.
“Most of us know the frustrating feeling of watching someone ‘fail upward’: landing successively sweeter gigs even after professional mediocrity or missteps.…..What is troubling, experts say, is the significant gap between who’s allowed to fail without penalty on the way up – and who never gets that chance……As people continue to move up, he says we’re conditioned to believe that their positions are the result of merit – and rarely ask questions about how they got there.”
Failing up is not just an issue of productivity or profits. It distorts power dynamics. Incompetent managers can influence the lives of others. They affect what time people get to leave the office, how difficult the workday becomes, how much money an employee gets to bring home. A bad manager is a drain on society.
I invite everyone to reflect on their own work experience. Have you unknowingly given different thresholds of failure to the people you work with? Is your own career success attributable in some way to being given more room to make mistakes than others? I believe workplaces should be kinder, but concede that this is an idealistic world. However, workplaces must be equal, and we all have a part to play in this.
Is experience the best measure of ability?
The fallacy of “What gets measured gets managed” - Calls out the problems of this popular management maxim. Firstly, this was never even said by the person it was attributed to, Peter Drucker. Also, rather than being advice for managers to measure everything and focus on quantitative factors, it is better construed as a warning not to fixate solely on quantitative factors, especially in a knowledge work world where many parts of our work cannot be reduced into numbers.
This made me think about a number that always comes up when getting a job - the requisite years of experience. I find it a flawed metric.
It creates a fixed hierarchy. Time passes at the same rate for everyone. Once an experience based approach is applied, the younger person is always subordinate to the senior. Trying to accelerate growth and progression is difficult.
It destroys mobility. It makes it hard to move in and out of industries, and locks everyone into working in the same one. This makes it hard for people to gain broad based knowledge and experience which is equally important. Worse, it does not allow for breaks, a year not working is a year of experience missed, even though the time spent on a break might be more useful in promoting better thought by reducing burnout.
Is more years of experience better?
Logically, more experience means seeing more situations, improving pattern recognition and speeding up thought. However, this applies to actual experience of the particular issue, not merely years in the job. I realise I can game the system by clocking my years of experience in the most relaxed way possible. I could be “experienced” only on the surface. Worse, I could have “experience” working on a project but only as an obstacle to its success.
Another thought I heard recently is that we need both experience and reflection. 10 years of viewing the same patterns and not improving, is merely the same year of experience repeated 10 times. In contrast, we can learn more and improve better if we are constantly reflecting on our work and mistakes, and thinking about how to improve.
The world is becoming faster. The number of potential permutations of any issue are increasing. The increased experience that comes from more years might not be significant, some of those years may not even be relevant anymore. The number of transactions the most senior lawyer has seen in a lifetime would only be a tiny drop in the number of transactions that happens even in the time you read this sentence. Is this a sufficient sample size for a significant difference in skill? Perhaps this could be easily surpassed by having a well-honed mind through good self-reflection, or a broad base of first principles coming from learning multiple disciplines of knowledge.
Thanks for reading! I do hope to hear about your thoughts or ideas!
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