Seeing Differently: When Experience Flows into Expertise
Essay 014
In an age that worships productivity, we have forgotten an ancient truth: wisdom emerges not from the doing but from thinking about what has been done. Our industrial inheritance—with its machine-like metaphors and factory-floor efficiencies—has colonized not just our workplaces but how we think about growth itself. We measure development in hours logged, certifications earned, and experiences accumulated, while neglecting the transformative process that turns these raw materials into something greater. Today's professional, rushing between meetings with a smartphone in hand, has become exactly what Marx warned about—producing outputs without understanding the deeper meaning of the work itself.
This isn't abstract philosophy but a practical reality. It's the measurable difference between the surgeon who has performed a thousand procedures by routine and the one whose thousand procedures have yielded a thousand insights. Between the executive who has weathered multiple crises through determination and the one who has extracted meaning from each challenge. Between accumulating experience and developing wisdom.
The question before us is simple yet profound: How does experience become expertise? How does doing become knowing?
Today's professional class inherits the legacy of Frederick Taylor's scientific management—where reflection was deliberately separated from labor and reserved for managers alone. The split between thinking and doing has become so embedded in how organizations function that we struggle to remember they were once inseparable.
The Illusion of Experience
"Practice, practice, practice," advises the New Yorker to the visitor asking how to get to Carnegie Hall. This comfortable advice has been built into development programs and performance metrics everywhere. Yet it fundamentally misrepresents how mastery actually happens.
Two woodworkers stand at their benches, both twenty years into their craft. The first approaches each new piece with mechanical efficiency, applying techniques with practiced precision but little variation. The second runs her hand along the grain, listening to what the wood tells her before making a single cut. Though both have put in identical years, only one has cultivated the sensitivity that transforms craft into artistry.
What separates them is not time but attention—not what they've done but what they've seen in the doing.
This distinction exists in every field of human effort. Two executives navigate corporate turbulence—one reacting with memorized playbooks, the other perceiving subtle patterns in organizational dynamics. Two physicians examine patients—one applying diagnostic algorithms, the other integrating clinical observations with a patient's lived experience. Two teachers face a classroom—one delivering curriculum, the other attuned to the unspoken dynamics of learning.
The organizations we've built, however, remain stubbornly blind to this difference. Performance reviews measure outputs rather than insights. Promotion criteria count years rather than depth of understanding. Leadership programs emphasize techniques rather than ways of seeing. We've constructed elaborate systems to develop people without acknowledging how development actually happens.
The Tyranny of Continuous Production
Reflection requires space—physical, mental, temporal—yet we have systematically eliminated these spaces in the name of efficiency. The modern professional's calendar is a monument to non-stop production: meetings scheduled back-to-back, lunch eaten at the desk, commutes filled with calls, evenings consumed by email. Even our supposed leisure has been colonized by productivity's logic, with meditation reduced to an app and nature experienced through the frame of an Instagram post.
This isn't merely a personal failing but predominantly a structural condition. While organizational cultures vary in their approaches, many that explicitly claim to value learning simultaneously eliminate the conditions necessary for it to occur. The prevailing metrics and reward systems rarely account for the invisible work of reflection.
The result is what might be called Taylorism of the mind—where even our thinking and creative work has been subdivided, standardized, and subjected to metrics that make reflection appear not just unnecessary but actively wasteful.
The Architecture of Reflection
Reflection unfolds across four interconnected dimensions, each penetrating to a different depth of understanding and together creating the foundation for a new way of seeing.
The first dimension examines what happened—the external events, outcomes, and observable facts. This is where most organizations begin and end their analysis: Did we meet the target? What were the deliverables? What measurable results occurred?
Equally important but frequently overlooked is the second dimension: what happened to me as it was happening—the internal experience that runs parallel to external events. Here we explore our real-time reactions, intuitions, and sensations: What did I feel in that moment? What caught my attention? What subtle signals did I notice or miss?
These first two dimensions, when examined together through deliberate reflection, form the crucial foundation for extracting learning. This is the methodology I use in leadership development programs—guiding participants to gather both external and internal data, creating a richer basis for insight than either alone could provide.
The third dimension probes how it happened—questioning not just outcomes but the processes, methods, and approaches that generated them. Here we begin to see patterns across different experiences, to recognize not just what worked but why it worked. Yet this level too remains largely focused on systems rather than the humans who animate them.
The fourth dimension, radically undervalued in organizational life, examines who we were as it happened—the assumptions we carried, the emotions we experienced, the perspectives we adopted or rejected. This is where true development occurs, not in the acquisition of new techniques but in the evolution of perception itself.
When all four dimensions are explored together—what happened, what happened to me, how it happened, and who we were—reflection becomes transformative. It doesn't just produce a collection of insights but catalyzes an expanded way of perceiving.
As these dimensions intertwine, they reshape not just what we know but how we see. This is what distinguishes expertise from mere experience—not the accumulation of knowledge, but the refinement of perception itself.
The Iterative Dance of Doing and Seeing
Mastery emerges through a continuous cycle—an iterative dance between action and reflection, between doing and seeing. Neither holds primacy over the other. They are inseparable partners in the development of wisdom.
Doing without reflection leads to mechanical repetition, while reflection without subsequent action remains mere contemplation. It is in their dynamic interplay—their constant conversation—that the alchemy of mastery occurs. This is not about creating separate time blocks labeled "reflection" and "action," but rather developing a heightened awareness that permeates the work itself. The expert doesn't stop to reflect—their perception has evolved to integrate reflection within action, seeing deeper patterns even as they perform.
The Courage to Not Know
Reflection requires not just space but a particular relationship with uncertainty—what Donald Schön called "the swampy lowland" where situations are confusing and resist technical solutions. The reflective practitioner must develop comfort with not knowing, with holding questions rather than grasping at premature answers.
This runs directly counter to prevailing leadership mythologies that prize decisiveness and certainty. Yet the difference between stagnation and growth is not how much one knows, but how much one is willing to question.
The reflective path does not promise certainty, nor does it offer quick solutions. Instead, it opens the door to a deeper, more attuned way of engaging with the world—where mastery is not a static achievement but an ever-evolving way of seeing and responding.
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