Why twenty years can teach you nothing.

We assume a leader with twenty years behind them decides better than one with five. The evidence does not support it. Time served is not the same as getting better.

An athlete does not only train. They measure. The session is recorded: power, splits, heart rate, recovery, all of it compared against last week and last season. They find the one thing holding the performance back, work on it, and measure again. The numbers keep them honest. You cannot tell yourself you trained hard when the data says you did not.

Now look at how you treat the most important thing you do. Your judgement is held to be a fixed trait, refined only by the slow passage of years. No instrument. No record of what you predicted. No comparison of the call against the result. The athlete measures the body and improves. The leader flies judgement blind and calls the result wisdom.

Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein spent careers on opposite sides of the argument about intuition. When they finally sat down together they agreed on one thing. The feeling of experience is not a reliable guide to the accuracy of judgement. A person can be highly experienced, highly confident and consistently wrong, and nothing in the felt sense of expertise will tell them which. Confidence grows with the years whether or not accuracy does.

So why does experience make a weather forecaster brilliant and a senior executive merely confident? Skill grows from experience only when two conditions hold. The world has to be regular enough that there are real patterns to learn. And the person has to get feedback that is fast and clear, so the patterns can be learned. Take away either and experience stops teaching, while the sense of expertise carries on growing.

Weather forecasters are among the best-calibrated decision-makers ever studied. When they say seventy per cent, it rains close to seventy per cent of the time. They are not unusually gifted. They predict every day and find out within hours whether they were right, for years. Blackjack dealers, who have dealt as many hands over as many years, are no better than a beginner at predicting the next one, because they deal and move on and never make a prediction to check. Same hours, opposite skill. The variable is not talent or time. It is whether the feedback arrived and was faced.

A leader's environment is close to the worst case for learning. The result of a major call arrives months or years later, tangled with a hundred other decisions, and by then nobody remembers what was predicted. A leader can make high-stakes decisions for thirty years and get almost no usable feedback on their judgement. Not a failure of character. A failure of feedback, built into the job.

The fix is to build the feedback the job withholds. Write the prediction down and put it beside the result, every time.

When did you last compare what you expected from a decision with what actually happened?