A Younger Mentor Showed Me the Specific Limits of My Experience

I had met Zainab at a professional event in Bristol where she was speaking about digital strategy at 24 with a precision and specificity that I found genuinely impressive.

We had exchanged details and had an irregular but warm professional friendship for about a year when I found myself in a strategic problem at work that I could not solve with the tools I had available. I had, at 28, four more years of experience than she did.

I had also, as she identified quite quickly when I described the problem, a set of assumptions about how the problem needed to be framed that were so embedded in my experience that I could not see them as assumptions. She could see them from outside.

She said, with the directness of someone who does not yet know she is supposed to be more indirect: you are treating this as a communications problem because that is the category of problem you know how to solve. It looks to me like a change management problem that has a communications component.

The reframe was immediate and obvious once she had provided it and had not been available to me because I had been inside the category my experience had built.

Experience had made me very good at some things and had also, I understood from that conversation, built certain patterns of perception that were now less a tool than a groove. I needed someone who had not yet developed the groove to see past it.

I began deliberately seeking perspectives from people earlier in their careers after that. Not in place of more experienced counsel but alongside it. The specific freshness of a perspective that has not yet been shaped by the patterns experience builds is useful in a way that cannot be replicated by more experience.