I had an interesting discussion about the subject of experience with some friends recently in an old schoolboys’ WhatsApp group. One cliché I have had to live with and hear people throw around has been the ‘experience is the best teacher…’ one, where we seem to believe that it is sacrosanct truth and give very little scrutiny once that statement is uttered. I am not sure anymore if I agree with that and I wish to explore the issue today openly and curiously with you.
When dealing with concrete matters such as counting eggs in a farm and maybe storing them and later moving them to the market, I think a person can easily be trained and trusted to deliver once trained. These are easy and light activities that need just that, memory, and action. Or do they? Maybe experience in this case is important in its crude form and there is no need to complicate things with the vicissitudes of experience. This role is easy to fill if one is recruiting but only on the dimension of skill and knowing what to do, using one’s brains and hands.
There is the attitude side to it though, which, for me is equally if not more critical when we view the whole issue from the point of view of risk. What are the risks associated with hiring a good, skilled, and knowledgeable person without digging deep into their soft or attitude side of experience?
How has this person experienced the values and beliefs of things? I believe that a human being goes through an environment, and gets challenged by it in many ways. If they face cold conditions like they did in the past, they look around and intelligently learn how to make a fire to keep themselves warm.
They use their brains to create solutions and as they find solutions, they become skilled and knowledgeable in that area. If I was recruiting and needed someone like that and did not know that there is more to someone’s performance than just the skills and knowledge, I would just get this guy and be home and dry.
Here is the interesting dimension to this issue, that this individual who is a skilled fire maker and knows which materials to add together to create a fire, has not gained this experience in a vacuum. They have done so within an environment with challenges that made them think about what it means to do this thing this way and also begin to believe that it must be done this way because if not done that way it will prejudice them somehow, or a member of their family. Say, for example, this man has a family, wife and kids who need the warmth he has discovered or is a beneficiary of because someone in the community has done the discovery. Say, this community is huge and that gaining access to the fire once it is made is not easy, or even getting enough firewood for his homestead is not easy because the community is big and survival difficult. What do you think happens to this man’s attitude towards fires and family?
He has to survive, and his family has to survive, or they will freeze to death and even fail to cook food using the fire.
Once put in that survival mode, the individual has to scheme, survive, or die and he knows it. He is inclined to think family first and that is difficult to classify as self-centred although that is exactly what it is. Gaining access to the fire or getting firewood might entail them denying others access to give it to family. Is that right? Well, as far as he is concerned, he has to take care of family and generally most human beings think that way.
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Some even push it at bigger collective identities such as race and tribe. They believe strongly that those who share the same skin colour with them are more human than everyone else and that faced with a life and death situation, these are the people to save and not any other colour.
If people can take this to the level of race, what more family? Is blood, not thicker than water? Of course, it is and so this man, the fire maker’s attitude is formed and cemented under those conditions. His family is in danger of death, as far as he is concerned, and he needs to save them by hook or crook. This is called self-centredness and it is difficult to pin down as wrong, but it is the kind of behaviour that can eat into the fibre of society or specific work community and render it difficult to operate gainfully or progressively. Let’s go back to the example of the egg gatherer we gave earlier. This man has a family and is employed to gather eggs. When he leaves home most of the time, he cannot leave enough for his family to live on and so his wife and kids complain about this. He comes from the same background as the fire maker where one is taught until it becomes second nature that family has to survive and that a man has to take care of his family.
What do you think the egg gatherer is going to do to survive? The egg owner has said that any breakages, the man can take home to his family if they need them. The breakage percentage seems to have gone up since this man joined and he has no explanation for it. The family at home has stopped complaining because they now have something to fry every day. It is the egg business owner who now complains about eggs breaking. Clearly the egg gatherer is experienced skill and also attitude wise. He has been in situations where family survival was threatened and came to believe that one has to put family and not eggs first, and his conscience is clear about that. He can reduce breakages briefly to avoid raising alarm, but he will still find ways of making sure that family survives and is happy.
Experience cannot just be about skill and knowledge because it is dangerous to view things that way. A human being is a complicated being and possibly when the egg gatherer had to face all these challenges earlier when his attitude was formed, he got traumatised and so walks around and works with his body carrying trauma. As has been said, ‘those in a trauma cycle, cannot see the flowers….’ This man sees no beauty in anything. If you give him flowers, he will boil them and give them to his family for dinner because that is all he sees and thinks, survival. Let’s explore this further next week and see how a body, through experience, can carry either pain or happiness.
*Bhekilizwe Bernard Ndlovu’s training is in human resources training, development and transformation, behavioural change, applied drama, personal mastery and mental fitness. He works for a Zimbabwean company as human capital executive, while also doing a PhD with Wits University where he looks at violent strikes in the South African workplace as a researcher. Ndlovu worked as a human resources manager for several blue-chip companies in Zimbabwe and still takes keen interest in the affairs of people and performance management. He can be contacted on [email protected]
