We pay a heavy price when we discount the value of experience.  And I think we are seeing some pretty clear evidence of the value of experience, and the cost of inexperience.

Three examples:

#1 – the Navy SEALs kill Osama Bin Laden, and the pilot who put the helicopter down in the only possible spot to salvage the mission.
#2 – The NFL settles for inexperienced replacement referees/officials.
#3 – The Police Officer who did not shoot (from Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink).

#1 – the Navy SEALs kill Osama bin Laden.  I watched the full 60 Minutes program a couple of weeks ago with Mark Owen (a pseudonym), author of No Easy Day, the former Navy SEAL who was one of the actual gunmen who pulled the trigger on Osama bin Laden (SEAL’s first-hand account of bin Laden killing).  In the middle of the story was this:

Scott Pelley: You mention in the book that one of the Army pilots that was flying your team looked to you to be about 50 years old?
Mark Owen: He was definitely a little older.
Scott Pelley: But I guess in this line of work, it’s experience that matters.
Mark Owen: Yeah. Yeah. He’s probably been flying longer than I’ve been alive. So there’s nothing wrong with that.

In the segment, with the help of a visual model, Mark Owen described how the pilot put the crippled helicopter down at the precise angle required.  Mr. Owen was pretty clear about his admiration for the pilot, and he strongly hinted that a young guy – you know, the age of the average SEAL on-board — would likely not have been able to pull that off.  Experience counted in the job where experience would most count on that mission.

#2 – The NFL settles for inexperienced replacement referees/officials.  This is from a news article after the second week of the NFL season, dealing with the replacement officials:  Replacement officials taking heat.

One official was pulled from duty because he’s a fan. Another negated a touchdown without ever throwing a penalty flag. Several others had difficulty with basic rules.
Upon further review, the NFL’s replacement officials came up short in Week 2.
Coaches and players around the league are losing patience and speaking out against the fill-in officials following a slew of questionable calls in the games Sunday and Monday night.
Some players are even joking about dipping into their own pockets to settle the contract dispute and get the regular officials back on the field.

Now, disagreeing with and yelling at the officials is an American pastime.  But it’s not just bad calls, and missed calls, and the sense that pretty soon the players will be running roughshod over the “substitute teachers.”  It is that the inexperience of these officials could carry a heavy cost in player safety.  And that is no small thing.  (A missed call on a helmet-to-helmet hit last Sunday in the Dallas Cowboys game was illustrative of this serious deficiency of inexperienced officials).

#3 – The Police Officer who did not shoot (from Galdwell’s Blink).  In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell describes in detail an incident when a (very young) criminal pulled a gun on a police officer.  The officer was ready to shoot, but in a very brief slice of time, was able to discern that the criminal was not actually going to shoot, and thus, he did not shoot either.  Here is Gladwell’s summary:

How long was this encounter?  Two seconds?  One and a half seconds?  But look at how the officer’s experience and skill allowed him to stretch out that fraction of time, to slow the situation down, to keep gathering information until the last possible moment…  This is the gift of training and expertise – the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.  To a novice, that incident would have gone by in a blur.  But it wasn’t a blur at all.  Every moment – every blink – is composed of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction.  (Blink, p. 241, print edition).

Back to the NFL officials.  What may be really costly is that the “entire game crew” is “inexperienced” at the NFL level.  There is no voice of experience in those “officials’ confabs,” when they get together to go over a situation.

I think we pay too high a price when we lose the voice, the years of dealing with stuff, that comes from experience.  And these three examples could be repeated time and time again.  Maybe we all need to be just a little more appreciative of the value of experience.