Experience is powerful. It helps us recognize risks quickly. It helps us ask sharper questions. It helps us see where projects can go wrong before others see it.
But experience can also decide what we notice first.
Years ago, my manager called me about a new project. A company wanted to build a radiopharmaceutical facility. My first reaction was curiosity.
Then I heard more. They had no radiopharmaceutical background. The initiative came from the brother of a physician who wanted to improve access to radiopharmaceuticals. And when I asked what the company did at that time, the answer I heard was:
A weaving company.
I remember thinking: They want to do what? A weaving company wants to build a radiopharmaceutical facility?
My brain immediately started listing risks. GMP. Radiation protection. Quality systems. Validation. Training. Regulatory approvals. Operations. Complex technology. Ambitious timelines.
And to be fair, those risks were real. My experience was not wrong.
But it was incomplete.
Because there was another pattern I could have seen earlier.
This company had started in textiles. Then they learned to add more value by colouring and finishing those textiles themselves. When reliable power supply became a constraint, they built their own power plant. When that power plant produced CO₂, they did not simply treat it as waste. They looked at how Dutch greenhouse operators used CO₂ to improve crop production. Then they built greenhouses. They grew produce. They used part of it for employee meals. They sold the rest.
Again and again, they had done the same thing: They encountered a constraint. They learned. They built capability. They opened a new possibility.
And then they encountered another constraint: access to radiopharmaceuticals. So they decided to learn that too.
That was the part I almost missed.
I saw the lack of radiopharmaceutical experience first. I almost missed the deeper capability: this was an organization that knew how to learn its way into unfamiliar territory.
And here is the part that makes the lesson uncomfortable. The project did not become difficult in the way I expected. It became one of the fastest, most efficient, and best projects I had worked on until then.
Not because there were no risks. But because the team knew how to learn.
They listened. They asked questions. They admitted what they did not know. They used experience from others without pretending they already had it. And they turned that learning into action.
So yes, I was right to see the risks. But I was wrong to see the missing experience before I saw the learning capability.
That lesson stayed with me.
The things we see most easily are not always the most important things to see.
Experience is valuable. But only if we keep questioning it.
So now, when I recognize a pattern quickly, I try to pause and ask:
What am I seeing first because of my experience? And what might I be missing because of it?
