Hidden in Plain Sight: Part 3 of 5 – “That’s the Speed I Was Trained On”: The Experience Trap

TL;DR: Experience is one of a leader’s most valuable assets, and quietly one of the easiest ways to go blind. On the job training hands down assumptions along with skills, promoting from within compounds the effect, and plain physical inertia keeps everyone standing still. One plant manager’s single sentence cost her company 40% of its output for years.

This is Part 3 of the Hidden in Plain Sight series. Part 2 covered why leaders don’t see hidden value. This one covers something harder to admit: why the things a company already knows, its experience, its training, its comfort with the way things are, actively keep the Black Gold hidden.

Why Does “That’s How I Was Trained” Explain So Much?

The most common answer we hear when we ask why a process runs a certain way isn’t a business reason. It’s “That’s how I was taught.”

At a company I’ll call Fishy Business, the plant manager, Janice, walked us up to the most complicated machine on her line, a multi-speed cutting machine slicing salmon into steaks.

“Is this machine a bottleneck?” we asked.
“Yes, it is,” Janice said.
“Does it run at more than one speed?”
“Oh yes,” she said, proudly. “It’s a multispeed machine.”
“What speed do you run it at?”
We watched the blood drain from her face. “Um… three.”
“Have you tried five?”
“No.  Three’s the speed I was trained on.”

Janice knew the machine was the bottleneck. She knew it had a faster setting. She’d worked next to that machine for years. And in all that time, the question had simply never come up, because the answer had been settled before she ever arrived. Janice had learned to run that plant from the person who ran it for thirty years before her. It worked at three. Until they had a dramatic increase in sales, nobody had ever needed to test anything else.

That weekend, she and a supervisor came in and ran it at full speed. It worked. Perfectly. Forty percent faster. Years of constrained output, ended by one untested assumption finally getting tested.

The most expensive settings in your company are the ones nobody remembers choosing.

How Does Good Training Pass Down Blind Spots?

That’s the first force: experience quietly writing untested defaults into daily operation, and handing them down as if they were facts. Nothing in Janice’s story involves anyone doing a bad job. Her trainer taught her exactly what he knew, and what he knew worked. That’s what good training is. It transfers the accumulated judgment of one generation to the next, efficiently, without making the new person rediscover everything from scratch.

The problem is that training can’t distinguish between knowledge and habit. The trainer passes along both in the same handoff: the hard-won lessons and the arbitrary defaults. The new person receives both with the same confidence. Medium speed arrived in Janice’s head with the same authority as every genuinely important thing she was taught, and nothing about it was labeled “assumption, please test later.”

This is the frog in the boiling water. Nobody decides to accept a slow process. The temperature never changes fast enough for anyone to notice they’re still in the pot. The cost of staying in it compounds for years before anyone adds it up. A constraint inherited on day one doesn’t feel like a constraint. It feels like the job.

It’s also exactly why promoting from within, one of the healthiest instincts a company can have, can quietly work against it. The next plant manager almost always learns the job from the last one, inheriting the skills and every unquestioned habit in the same handoff. Promote from within for three generations and a company ends up with deep loyalty, strong culture, and a set of thirty-year-old assumptions that no living person in the building has ever examined. Good training passes down knowledge. It passes down blind spots right along with it, generation after generation, unless somebody stops to test them.

Experience tells you what worked. It stays silent about what was never tried.

Why Isn’t Knowing Enough to Drive Action?

Now add the second force, the one that keeps even a leader who suspects the truth from doing anything about it.

A body at rest tends to stay at rest. That’s physics, not strategy, but it applies to organizations just the same. Most companies don’t change because they understand a problem intellectually. They change because something forces them to, because the pain of staying still finally outweighs the effort of moving.

And let’s be fair to the resistance: change is scary for good reason. The current way, whatever its flaws, is proven. It ships product. It makes payroll. The new way is a theory. Every operator who hesitates to touch a setting that’s worked for thirty years is doing a reasonable risk calculation with the information they have. The problem isn’t that people fear change. The problem is that the fear gets to vote every day, while the upside of changing has never once been put on the ballot, because nobody has quantified it.

That’s why waiting for pain is such an expensive strategy. Pain eventually shows up: a lost customer, a margin squeeze, a competitor who figured it out first. By then, the cost of the untested assumption has been compounding for years. The leaders who capture Shocking Profit early are the ones who manufacture their own urgency instead of waiting for the market to deliver it, who treat “we’ve always done it this way” not as an answer but as a flag.

Inertia doesn’t feel like a decision. That’s what makes it the most expensive one you’re making.

What Does It Take to Test an Assumption Nobody Remembers Making?

The fix here isn’t dramatic, and that’s precisely the point. Janice’s 40% didn’t come from a consultant’s proprietary framework. It came from someone finally asking a question the building had stopped asking. There’s a repeatable practice inside that.

Start with the bottlenecks. Every operation knows where its constraint is, and the constraint is where an inherited assumption costs the most. Ask three questions about it: why does it run the way it runs, who decided that, and when was it last tested. If the answers are “that’s how I was trained,” “the person before me,” and “never,” that’s a candidate.

Then test small and safe. Janice didn’t bet the plant. She came in on a weekend, ran the machine at full speed with a supervisor watching, and let the result speak. Most inherited assumptions can be tested in hours, at low risk, off the critical path. The barrier was never the cost of the test. It was the idea that there was anything to test.

And make the questioning normal. In the book I call this replacing judgment with curiosity. A company where “why do we do it this way” is a welcome question surfaces its own hidden constraints continuously. A company where that question reads as criticism keeps every one of them, forever.

FAQ’s

Why do employees say “that’s how I was trained” so often?

Because it’s true, and because training transfers habits and knowledge in the same handoff without labeling which is which. An arbitrary default arrives with the same authority as a hard-won lesson, so people execute both faithfully. It’s a sign of good training discipline paired with an untested assumption, not of a careless workforce.

Is promoting from within bad for a company?

No, it’s one of the healthiest instincts a company can have, building loyalty, culture, and continuity. The hidden cost is that each generation inherits the last one’s unexamined assumptions along with its skills. The fix isn’t to stop promoting from within. It’s to pair internal promotion with a deliberate practice of testing inherited process settings.

How do companies find assumptions nobody remembers making?

Start at the bottleneck and ask three questions about how it runs: why this way, who decided, and when was it last tested. Answers like “that’s how I was trained” and “never” mark a candidate. Then run a small, safe test, off-shift, supervised, low stakes, and let the result make the argument.

Why don’t companies change even when they know better?

Inertia. Organizations, like objects, stay at rest until something supplies energy, and the proven current way always feels safer than an unquantified better way. Without a number attached to the upside, the fear of change wins every daily vote. Leaders who move early manufacture their own urgency instead of waiting for pain.

What does the frog in boiling water mean in business?

It describes gradual normalization: conditions degrade or underperform so slowly that nobody registers a change worth reacting to. No one decides to accept a slow process. The temperature just never jumps enough to trigger alarm, so the cost compounds quietly for years until someone measures it.

The Next Question

An untested assumption explains why the capacity was hidden. It doesn’t explain the size of what was sitting behind it. Part 4 runs the actual numbers, what Janice’s machine was really worth, why companies reach for a checkbook instead, and what happened when one client finally priced what better would be.

Whether you’re a leadership team stuck in firefighting mode or a PE operating partner sizing up a target, that’s what we do at The ProAction Group. Call us at (312) 726-6111, or grab 20 minutes directly on my calendar at calendly.com/tvm, for a complimentary consultation.

Next in the series: Part 4 – The Math Nobody Ran.