Experience is getting a bad rap these days. No, I’m not talking about the election campaign. The February 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review has an article called “The Experience Trap.” Two professors at INSEAD (France), using a simulation tool, tested how senior software project managers actually manage projects. They found that “managers with experience did not produce high-caliber outcomes“. In the simulation (which the participants rated as being very life-like), project managers did not revise estimates despite new data becoming available; they did not anticipate problems despite having handled similar projects many times before. The authors call this the “experience trap”.

However, the discussion points more to problems with learning: the managers had seen these same problems in the past, but acted as if they were seeing the problems for the first time. The researchers argue that it is a lack of learning that leads to these problems.

So, as I see it, this research finding translates to the project managers lacking “intelligence”: the ability to respond to new situations and to learn from them. More specifically, these project managers lack Operational ISmarts, and need to be trained to develop this aspect of innovational intelligence.