Why Experience Isn't Enough
School leaders accumulate an enormous amount of experience over the course of their careers.
They observe thousands of classrooms. They attend hundreds of meetings. They analyze endless reports, dashboards, and assessment results. They implement new initiatives, solve problems, respond to crises, and make countless decisions.
With all of that experience, you might expect schools and districts to become steadily better over time.
Yet many don't.
Schools and districts can spend years working on the same problems. New initiatives come and go. Leadership teams work incredibly hard. Teachers devote themselves to helping students succeed. Still, many of their biggest challenges remain remarkably consistent.
If experience naturally produces learning, why doesn't all of this experience reliably lead to better organizations?
More than thirty years ago, W. Edwards Deming offered an answer that changed the way I think about leadership:
"Experience without theory teaches nothing."
When I first encountered that statement, I thought Deming had to be exaggerating.
How could experience not teach us?
Isn't experience one of our greatest teachers?
Deming wasn't arguing that experience has no value. His point was that experience, by itself, cannot tell us what to learn. As he wrote in Out of the Crisis, "Experience will answer a question, and a question comes from theory."
Experience becomes learning only when it causes us to test and improve the theories that guide our actions.
That single idea has enormous implications for anyone trying to improve a school, a district, or any other organization.
What Theory Really Means
When people hear the word theory, they often think of something abstract or academic. In reality, every leader already operates from theories, whether they call them that or not.
Simply put, a theory is an explanation for how and why something works.
Every significant leadership decision is based on one.
If a principal decides that weekly classroom observations will improve instruction, that is the theory. If a superintendent believes a new reading curriculum will raise achievement, that is the theory. If a leadership team reorganizes staffing, changes the school schedule, or launches a new initiative, those decisions reflect theories about what will produce better results.
The question isn't whether organizations operate from theory. The question is whether those theories are explicit enough to be examined, tested, and improved.
Experience does not arrive with its own explanation. We decide what to observe, what questions to ask, and what conclusions to draw based on the theories we already hold. Two leaders can experience the same event and reach completely different conclusions because they begin with different assumptions about how improvement happens.
Once I began to appreciate this idea, I started seeing theory everywhere.
Strategic plans reflect theories about where an organization should go and how it will get there. Budgets reflect theories about where resources will have the greatest impact. Professional development reflects theories about how adults learn. Teacher evaluation systems reflect theories about what motivates improvement. Accountability systems reflect theories about how better performance is achieved.
Whether those theories are sound is a separate question.
The important point is that whether we recognize them or not, theories guide the way we lead our organizations.
Experience Doesn't Change Organizations. Learning Does.
Several years ago, my thinking about strategic planning began to change.
Like many organizations, we had written strategic plans before, including one developed with an outside consultant. It contained worthwhile priorities and useful ideas, but over time it became disconnected from how we actually led the organization. Looking back, I don't think the problem was the plan itself. It reflected the theory we held at the time about what strategic planning was supposed to accomplish.
As we developed our current strategic plan, I began to see its purpose differently. We didn't just need a document that described where we wanted to go. We needed a plan that made our thinking visible, connected long-term direction to the way we managed the organization, and could evolve as we learned more about the system we were trying to improve.
That shift changed far more than the plan itself. It influenced how we designed our management system, structured leadership meetings, reviewed organizational performance, and connected long-term strategy to daily work.
I hadn't simply learned how to write a better strategic plan. I had changed my theory about what strategic planning was for.
From Experience to Organizational Learning
The lesson extends well beyond strategic planning. If organizations are going to learn from experience, they need a disciplined way to make their theories explicit, test them against reality, and revise them based on what they learn.
This is where strategic planning and the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle fit together.
Planning exists to make theory explicit.
A plan represents our best current thinking about how we will achieve an aim. It forces us to make choices about what we believe matters, what we intend to do, and what we expect will happen as a result.
PDSA exists to test and improve theory.
Through PDSA, we make predictions, test changes, compare what actually happened with what we predicted would happen, and use the difference to improve our understanding of the system. The goal is not simply to determine whether an idea "worked." It is to learn something that improves the theory guiding our next action.
Together, planning and PDSA form an organization's learning system.
Planning makes our current theory explicit. PDSA allows us to test that theory against reality. What we learn informs our next actions and, over time, changes the theory reflected in the plan. The cycle continues as the organization acts, learns, and revises its understanding of how to achieve its aim.
Seen this way, leadership becomes less about implementing one good idea after another and more about building an organization capable of continually improving the theories that guide its actions.
Putting It All Together
Most organizations have no shortage of experience. They have years of meetings, initiatives, assessments, professional development sessions, and hard work.
Organizations accumulate activity much faster than they accumulate knowledge.
That is why Deming's insight remains so important. Experience without theory teaches nothing because experience alone cannot tell us what to learn.
Organizations improve when they systematically improve the theories that guide their actions.
Three ideas summarize this month's lesson.
Big Idea 1: Experience alone does not produce organizational learning. Learning occurs when we use experience to test and improve the theories that guide future action.
Big Idea 2: Every significant leadership decision is based on a theory, whether that theory is explicit or implicit.
Big Idea 3: Organizations continually improve by making their theories explicit and systematically testing and improving them.
In future posts, I'll continue exploring what it looks like to intentionally design organizations that continually improve. Along the way, we'll examine the management systems, leadership practices, and improvement methods that help translate long-term purpose into better teaching, stronger organizations, and better outcomes for students.
Whenever You're Ready, Here Are Three Ways to Continue the Work
1. EMAIL JOHN
Have a question, an improvement idea, or a challenge you're trying to work through? I regularly exchange ideas and resources with educators across the country and beyond, and I'd welcome hearing what you're working on.
If you're looking for a thought partner who understands the realities of leading complex school systems, I work with leaders to strengthen decision-making, build learning systems, and improve organizational performance over time.
Win-Win is an improvement science text written for education leaders. It equips readers with the concepts and habits of mind from W. Edwards Deming's System of Profound Knowledge to help them improve systems, not just react to results.
John A. Dues serves as the chief learning officer for United Schools, a nonprofit charter management organization that supports four public charter school campuses in Columbus, Ohio. He is also the author of the award-winning book Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools. Send feedback to jdues@unitedschools.org.