From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
How do you distinguish between Ten years experience and One year experience ten times?

Response:
I love analogies. When we attempt to describe capability, we most often fall into analogies.

• This person has a Post-It Note mentality.
• We need more band-width in this role.
• We have to get more horsepower on this project.

When I press for articulation, most often the explanation is another analogy. But when I look around the room, everyone knows intuitively what is meant by Post-It Notes, band-width and horsepower.

So, what’s the difference between Ten years experience and One year experience ten times?

Elliott Jaques (Requisite Organization) most clearly depicted these different states of thinking and corresponding levels of work –

• Stratum I – Declarative Processing – the ability to focus on single task, direct output, solving problems through trial and error. Logic consists mostly of opinion without evidence to support.
• Stratum II – Cumulative Processing – the ability to piece together separate elements of a problem, pattern detecting, solving problems through past experience, documented in SOPs, best practices.
• Stratum III – Serial Processing – the ability, not only to see patterns, but cause and effect relationships between elements. Problem solving through comparative analysis, root cause analysis. The ability to sequence discrete elements into an efficient system.
• Stratum IV – Parallel Processing – the ability to handle multiple serial processes simultaneously. Not multi-tasking, but seeing the interdependency, contingency and bottlenecks that exist between multiple systems and sub-systems. Problem solving through systems analysis.

So, now you tell me. What’s the difference between Ten years experience and One year experience ten times?