(In)Experience

Delivered this long ago. Have been lazy putting it up here.

Here's a draft of what I spoke for my Project 9 of Competent Communicator Manual.
Hope you enjoy the next 7 minutes. :)

" Inexperience is inability. Are you sure?

How many of you sitting here have been shut down by someone who supposedly knows more than you?

It has happened to me too. In this era of constant change, I have been denied by the people who are more senior, more experienced, more knowledgeable than me. Where I’ve felt like a naïve kid among distinguished adults.

Fellow Toastmasters and Dear Guests

I had always learnt, knowledge and experience are the two ingredients. And hence been wary of stepping into situations where I did not have any experience.

I work as a Learning & Development professional. Recently, I had to deliver a new program. Now this program was related to something I had never done before.

A newbie, a facilitator, a 20 something year old working professional, here I was, standing in front of thirty leaders. From across job levels, across geographies and across cultures. They looking at me impatiently and expectantly.

I didn’t know what I was in for when I had accepted this client session request. The unit had asked me to deliver creative workshop that I usually delivered as part of my profile. The project folks flew me to Hyderabad and showered me with luxury: a chauffeur driven car waiting for me at the airport with a placard with my name on it, a room in a posh hotel, expenses and else. I felt obliged to them for delivering something worthy.

They rented a conference room in a five-star hotel for me to deliver my workshop. As I was led in to meet the entire team, the manager turned to me and said, “Oh, by the way, instead of the workshop, we’d like you to use the concepts and help us create a business plan for our next financial quarter.” It was a bombshell. My preparation was wasted. I had no idea about this.

I stood in front of the eager team. The room oozed of wealth and opulence; embroidered tablecloths, ornate chairs and hi-tech screens everywhere. I felt ill at ease. I was used to open spaces and bare floors, a place where you could make mistakes with freedom.

I questioned myself, is my inexperience here, an inability? I severely doubted myself.

Mustering up the courage, I started. Gave a short talk about myself; in reality I was stalling for time, trying to work out what to do. I knew I couldn’t produce anything creative in the room, yet they’d spent a fortune on it.

To the dismay of the hotel staff, I made them move all the tables and chairs out. I didn’t want everyone sitting down feeling relaxed. With the room empty, I felt better. It was like a blank canvas to an artist or a blank sheet of paper to a writer. They all looked irritated, though.

The production unit team were struggling to create this business plan for their financial quarter because their ideas were predictable and dull. They wanted me to resurrect the ideas, make them alive again, make THEM come up with creative, innovate ideas.

I rather thought and told them, it would be easier to scarp their ideas and start afresh. Better to think new ideas than waste time in trying to salvage old ones. They were annoyed at this.

The team of coders, developers, testers, consultants, business analysts, managers, delivery managers, clients, and more had attitudes that stifled creative thinking: “I have been doing this for years. I’m an expert. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

How many of you have been faced with remarks like that? Remarks that have curbed your new ideas. Your crazy ideas?

Just because you and I were unexperienced? And this inexperience considered as an inability?

They wanted to do things the way they had always done them.

But friends, you cannot come up with unusual things if you keep doing them the usual way. Open your mind to new ideas.

I swapped their roles. I asked the testers and developers to write up the allocations for new joiners, the consultants to think of the technical aspects. They were furious. Because they were out of their comfort zone.

I had to convince them to give it a try. Eventually they opened up and had a go. Fear of failure vanished because weight of expectation had been lifted. They no longer had a reputation to protect because they were not doing what they’d been trained to do. They improvised. They played around. New, original ideas poured out. They had fun. They were liberated. We created some new ideas with exciting numbers, unusual settings and innovative plans.

Friends, as a naïve beginner that day I had an advantage of having a fresh perspective. And I tried infusing it in them too by changing their roles. As a new role, they had no idea what was ‘wrong’ because they anyway didn’t know what was ‘right’.

As the leadership expert Liz Wiseman says, as an expert we think we’ve got it all figured out. It’s almost like flying through the day on an autopilot mode. Which is absolutely fine when the world is stable but when the world is changing fast, we need to move through the world of work like backpackers venturing out exploring new terrain; exploring new answers to problems.

I do not mean to discredit experience. Experience matters. But also inexperience doesn’t necessarily mean your inability.

Rather than being an expert, getting into a repetitive ritual of repeating the same experience over and over again, look at it from the eyes of a 4 year old. A 4 year old for whom everything is possible.

Challenge is not to get the innovative thoughts in mind but to get the old ones out. For that, spend a day working on something that’s valuable, but not what you’re ‘supposed’ to be working on. Switching to the new tasks would definitely create an environment that encourages innovation.

Inexperience is inability. Are you sure?"