Practical Experience v Theoretical Knowledge

When I first started at Toyota in the early 1990s, I remember one of my Japanese trainers explaining to me that Toyota valued practical experience over theoretical knowledge.

It was something that stuck with me, although I'm not sure I completely understood what he meant at the time.

Years later I was working with another large automotive manufacturer and that conversation came back to me.

The Ceiling on Experience

This company had a very different approach. You could progress through the organisation based on your performance and experience, but only to a certain level. Without the required formal qualifications, such as a degree, there was effectively a ceiling on how far you could go.

I saw some really good people hit that ceiling.

They knew the operation, understood the processes, knew the people and had years of practical experience. Some would have made very good senior managers, but they couldn't progress because they didn't have the required academic qualifications.

At the same time, people who did have degrees could progress beyond them, even where the degree itself wasn't particularly relevant to the job.

I remember thinking back to what I'd been told at Toyota.

The Problem With Experience

But after nearly four decades working in operations, I don't think it's quite as simple as saying practical experience is better than theoretical knowledge.

There is a problem with experience as well.

We only know what we've experienced.

If someone has worked in a business for 20 years, that's potentially a huge amount of knowledge and experience. But what if they've spent those 20 years working in an environment where poor practices have become normal?

Maybe managers are expected to solve every problem themselves. Perhaps firefighting is rewarded. Recurring problems are accepted as part of the job. People develop workarounds rather than asking why the problem exists in the first place.

Someone can become extremely experienced at working in that environment. It doesn't necessarily mean they've experienced the best way of doing things.

What Experience Needs

I was fortunate that a lot of my early experience was gained at Toyota. The behaviours I saw there influenced how I thought about operations from a relatively young age.

Go and look at what is actually happening. Talk to the people doing the work. Don't accept recurring problems as normal. Look for the root cause. Improve the process rather than blame the person.

If I'd spent those early years somewhere with completely different behaviours, presumably my own experience and thinking would have developed differently.

That's why I think practical experience needs something else alongside it. It needs challenge, new knowledge and, quite often, guidance from people who have experienced something different.

Building on What People Already Know

I've met plenty of experienced people during my career who are very good at what they do. Quite often they already know where the problems are as well.

What they haven't necessarily had is the opportunity to learn a different way of looking at those problems.

Teach someone structured problem solving and suddenly something they've worked around for years becomes something they want to understand.

Introduce Lean thinking and they start questioning waste they've previously accepted as part of the job.

Develop a Team Leader differently and they can begin to understand that being a good leader doesn't mean personally solving every problem. It means developing a team that is capable of solving problems.

That's where I think the combination becomes really powerful. You aren't disregarding someone's experience and telling them everything they've learned is wrong. You're building on it.

Why Apprenticeships Work Here

And this is one of the reasons I think developing existing employees is so important.

Take someone who already understands the business, the processes and the people. Give them some new knowledge, expose them to different ways of thinking, provide the right coaching and guidance, and then let them apply it to something real in their own workplace.

This is also where workplace apprenticeships can work particularly well. The employee doesn't have to put their experience to one side and go back to a classroom to start again. Their experience becomes part of the learning.

A real problem can become their improvement project. A real team becomes where they develop their leadership skills. Something that has frustrated them for years can become the opportunity to apply a new way of thinking.

The business gets an improvement and the individual develops at the same time.

Final Thought

Coming back to that conversation with my Japanese trainer all those years ago, I still agree with him that practical experience is enormously valuable.

I certainly don't believe good people should have an artificial ceiling put above them simply because they didn't follow a particular academic route earlier in their lives.

But I also don't believe that having 20 years' experience automatically means someone has nothing left to learn.

There's an old saying that someone can have 20 years' experience, or they can have one year's experience repeated 20 times. I think there's a lot of truth in that.

For me, the best combination is someone with genuine practical experience who is then exposed to new knowledge, different perspectives and good guidance, and is given the opportunity to put all of that into practice.

Perhaps that's what my Japanese trainer was really trying to teach me. Experience is incredibly valuable. But it becomes even more valuable when we're prepared to challenge it.

— Richard Pounder

Founder, Complete Lean Solutions

(Ex Toyota TPS Office)