When Experience Becomes a Blind Spot

If you’ve spent enough years in a plant, you develop a sixth sense. You can hear when a pump doesn’t sound right. You can feel when a startup is drifting off plan. You can spot a “minor” deviation that’s about to become a major headache. That experience has been earned, and in high-hazard environments, it saves lives. But there’s a quieter risk we rarely talk about: when experience stops sharpening judgment and starts dulling curiosity. The comfort and danger of “we’ve seen this before.”

How Familiarity Shuts Down Challenge

“We’ve seen this before” is one of the most reassuring phrases in operations. It signals calm and control. It tells the team to relax; this isn’t new. Often, that reassurance is true, patterns repeat, and equipment behaves predictably. The problem isn’t experience itself, it’s what happens when we rely on it instead of asking questions.

Over time, “we’ve seen this before” can shut down challenge, fresh perspective and early warning signals – not through arrogance, but through habit. Newer engineers hesitate to question assumptions, junior operators second-guess their instincts and contractors keep observations to themselves. No one told them to stop speaking up, but the issue is that experience has become a hierarchy.

The Unspoken Hierarchy of Experience

In many facilities, the most experienced voices dominate by default. Others defer out of respect, not fear. The effect is subtle but consistent: conversations narrow:

• “What else could this be?” becomes “It’s always done this.”
• “What’s changed?” becomes “That’s normal behavior.”

This isn’t a sign of a toxic culture; it’s a sign of an unexamined habit that can lead to increased risk. Temporary workarounds become permanent, minor deviations become accepted, alarms fade into background noise. What once triggered an investigation becomes “it’s just how the system behaves.” Experience reframes these signals as non-issues until they aren’t.

This is how risk drift develops: not through recklessness, but through repeated exposure to small anomalies that never quite cross the threshold for action. Over time, teams become desensitized. The baseline shifts quietly, without anyone consciously agreeing to accept more risk. By the time something fails, the warning signs feel obvious in hindsight, even though they were easy to dismiss at the time. After incidents, the same reflection emerges: “Several people noticed something wasn’t quite right, but no one pushed it.” That isn’t incompetence, it’s a failure of operational curiosity.

Operational Curiosity and Leadership Blind Spots

Curiosity is often framed as an individual quality: something some people have, and others don’t. In operational environments, that way of thinking can be dangerous.

Curiosity shows up in practical moments: when someone asks what’s different this time, when alternative explanations are explored rather than dismissed or when unease is treated as useful information instead of an inconvenience. Most importantly, it appears when questioning is built into how work is done, rather than left to personal courage.

This is where leadership plays a critical role. The more experienced you are, the less likely people are to challenge you, unless you deliberately make space for it. Intent isn’t enough, behavior sets the tone: who speaks first, how questions are received, when curiosity is welcomed, all shape what others feel safe to say.

When senior leaders consistently provide the “right answer” early, teams anchor to it. When uncertainty is seen as weakness, people stop voicing it. Over time, leaders don’t just hold authority; they also unknowingly narrow the range of perspectives that feed into decisions. The result is leadership that hasn’t adapted to the risks of its own experience.

Turning Experience Back Into an Asset

Experience becomes dangerous only when it goes unquestioned. High-performing teams don’t dilute experience; they build in these safeguards: pause points, dissent, rotating voices, explicit invitations to challenge and space to explore alternative views.

Consistency is critical – curiosity can’t appear only after incidents or during audits. It has to show up in everyday decisions, for example, shift handovers, MOCs, toolbox talks and reviews. When questioning becomes routine rather than by exception, teams stop seeing challenge as risk and start seeing it as part of doing the job well.

The most powerful question in a high-experience environment isn’t technical: What might we be missing because this feels familiar? That question doesn’t undermine expertise. It protects it.

Final Thoughts

Experience should widen perspective, not narrow it. In complex, high-risk systems, the greatest threats rarely come from what we don’t know – they come from what we stop questioning.

When curiosity is treated as a control rather than a nice-to-have, experience becomes what it was always meant to be: a safeguard, not a blind spot.