What is the value of experience in the absence of alternatives?
Imagine you are choosing where to go on vacation for the first time in your life, and you have a choice between a hotel in Turkey or a hotel in Greece. Both are 5-star hotels with different yet comparable sets of services, and the prices are similar in both places.
You chose Greece. You went on vacation, relaxed, and gathered impressions. Now you have experience. Or do you? You have nothing but the path you traveled. Your experience is worth nothing. You won’t be able to say whether Greece is better than Turkey. You can’t be sure that you got the most out of what you paid for. You don’t know what you missed out on; you can’t tell which of the things you didn’t like are systemic issues with hotel stays and which are just shortcomings of a specific hotel, and so on. You don’t have the experience that would allow you to make sound judgments.
Do you think you’ll gain experience after you go to Turkey next year? If you go. Many people love what they’ve tried once so much that they keep returning to the same place, without even considering what it might be like in a different hotel or another country. Okay, you arrive in Turkey. You have experiences. However, this is already your second experience, and you start comparing it to the first one instead of having another first impression. You still can’t have an objective judgment about the advantages and disadvantages of each specific country, let alone each specific hotel. The country isn’t even the main point.
Who has experience? Experience is with a great travel agent who has a lot of expertise. He understands the first impressions of different people with various tastes and budgets. He knows the second impressions and the third. He is familiar with the experiences of hotels and countries. This is his job. He earns commissions for applying the experiences of many to a specific client.
Now let’s take a manager. He has leadership experience. He has been running a company, overseeing sales, the operations department, finance, logistics… anything really, for five years. He has been following his own principles and heuristics for five years. He believes he has experience. After all, he has been successful so far. Hasn’t he? But would he have been even more successful if the manager acted not according to what he thinks is right, but in the most effective way?
Experience, as in the previous example, is only present with the business consultant. And for this, consultants receive their fee.