When Experience Becomes an Asset—and a Liability

 

After you've been in destination marketing for a long time, something interesting begins to happen. You find yourself sitting in meetings where you remember why a policy was created, who originally proposed a program, what happened the last time someone suggested a particular idea, and sometimes even what was tried twenty years ago.

That institutional knowledge can be enormously valuable. It can also become dangerous.

Experience gives us perspective. We recognize patterns. We remember mistakes and understand the personalities and history behind decisions that may otherwise make little sense. As a CEO, that knowledge helped me navigate difficult situations and occasionally recognize trouble before it arrived.

But I've also come to believe that one of the greatest challenges for an experienced leader is making sure experience doesn't become an excuse for resisting change. Four words can quietly kill innovation in an organization: "We tried that before." Maybe we did. Maybe it failed spectacularly. But when did we try it? Five years ago? Ten? Twenty?

The destination may have changed. Technology certainly has. Travelers have changed. Our partners may be different. The economics may be different. And perhaps most importantly, the person proposing the idea today may see something I didn't see the first time.

That's where curiosity becomes essential.

The longer I worked in this industry, the more I realized I didn't need to be the person in the room with all the answers. I needed to be someone willing to ask good questions. What has changed? Why might this work now? What are younger travelers telling us? What are we assuming to be true simply because it used to be true?

Experienced CEOs also have an obligation to make room for younger professionals.When someone has spent decades building institutional knowledge, it's tempting to become its guardian. I think we should become its teacher instead.

Tell younger staff why decisions were made. Share the stories behind successes and failures. Explain the relationships that shaped the organization. Then give them room to challenge what you've told them.

Mentoring shouldn't mean creating younger versions of ourselves. It should mean giving emerging leaders the benefit of our experience while allowing them to build something different with it.

That requires humility.

Sometimes the youngest person at the table will understand a changing audience better than I do. A new employee might ask a question everyone else stopped asking years ago. Someone unfamiliar with "how we've always done it" will see an opportunity the rest of us have learned not to notice. That's not a threat to experienced leadership. It's one of its greatest opportunities.

I still believe institutional knowledge matters. Organizations that don't understand their history are destined to repeat unnecessary mistakes. But history should inform decisions, not dictate them. There's a difference between saying, "We tried that before, and here's what we learned," and saying, "We tried that before, so there's no reason to try again." The first invites conversation. The second ends it.

Perhaps that's the responsibility that comes with being the longest-serving person in the room. We carry the organization's memory, but we shouldn't allow that memory to become its ceiling. Experience is most valuable when it helps the next generation go farther than we did, not when it tells them where to stop.