Experience has value.
No knowledge can match experience gained by actually living through something.
To know a subject in detail, experiencing it yourself gives the deepest understanding. Experience lets you observe the subject at high resolution. Until you try it, you don't know the subject — or the environment around it.
[Understanding a subject = knowledge of the subject itself × resolution] — something like that?
For example, "experience with X" isn't only knowing universal rules and principles of X. It also means knowing in the flesh who the stakeholders are as you push X forward, and what effects a given behavior or measure might have. You need knowledge plus high resolution.
So when you convey a specific experience to someone, you don't hand over knowledge in isolation. You visually recall the situation and weave knowledge together with the surrounding environment.
Even after experiencing something, though, "resolution" and "ability to put things into words" differ by person, so the relationship looks like this:
[Subject > the experiencer's own understanding > output when telling others]
When you pass on an experience, that output is mainly built from three factors: [knowledge of the subject] × [degree of resolution] × [ability to verbalize].
Say the subject is 100. Almost no one understands all of it. If the experiencer understands 50, the output when speaking to others might be about half of that — around 25. (※ In practice you almost never need to understand a subject completely anyway.)
What's interesting is where someone who hasn't experienced it — or the listener — sits in this chain:
[Subject > the experiencer's own understanding > output when telling others]
Logically, at each step — subject → person who understands it → verbalized output — the yield should be 100% or less, so you'd expect:
[Subject > the experiencer's own understanding > output when telling others > the listener's understanding]
That's the normal case. When you listen, you basically only need to hear what you want to hear — even if it's 1/100 of the subject.
Sometimes, though, it doesn't go that way.
Outstanding executives and people called geniuses can hear someone else's story without experiencing it themselves and grasp the essence of the subject at least better than the speaker. In other words:
[Subject > the listener's understanding > the experiencer's own understanding > output when telling others]
What are those listeners good at? Imagination, I'd say.
From the talk, using existing knowledge as an axis, they can invent the environment around the subject.
And this isn't only for geniuses. If the listener already has domain knowledge of that subject or something related, they can often imagine the essence easily.
Still, that existing knowledge usually came from hands-on experience in other fields. If they could imagine without that, they'd truly be a genius.
Strategy consultants can advise clients on businesses they haven't run themselves because, using "resolution" and "verbalization," they can understand the subject better than the client and add value. (I'm not a strategy consultant, so the concrete details are fuzzy to me.)
Consultants with deep domain knowledge from a long track record in that industry, or who came from that industry, are even more so — if their strength is resolution.
That said, "resolution" splits into many kinds. Even a strong consultant doesn't always have [consultant resolution > client resolution]. If that always held, consultants should just run the business themselves.
What they're strong at is resolution on business models or value chains, or on specific areas of corporate management (ones that are critical to goals like performance) — plus the ability to put that into words.
That's what I wanted to say. Sorry the trigger comes last — I'll write how this idea came up.
I once got help from an external partner in a certain area.
When something was unclear, I'd ask them — not only for knowledge of the subject, but also questions with no clear answer. Often I'd get comments based on their gut feel.
In the terms above, I was valuing resolution.
And I thought: "I lean on his experience a lot — but can't experience ≈ knowing case studies?" On that logic I started storing cases from specific domains in Notion as a database.
But as we've been discussing, those cases may be partly useful, yet without my imagination they don't mean much.
It's study for the sake of accumulating a database. At least, it wouldn't hold up in real work.
Better to have them than not — but over-focusing on stockpiling cases, or publishing pseudo-practical write-ups and feeling like you've produced output, is dangerous. That thought sparked this post.
Note: this post extends a bit on an earlier one, "The most efficient way to gather information".
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