The Experience Crisis No One’s Talking About (Yet)
The word “apprenticeship” comes from Renaissance-era Latin — “someone learning.” Guilds formalized what humans had always known: mastery isn’t taught. It’s built through reps. Through doing the work badly enough times that you start to feel when it’s right.
That concept hasn’t changed in 600 years. But the reps just disappeared.
AI is absorbing the exact cognitive labor that builds expertise — the research, the drafting, the messy first models. And most organizations are celebrating the efficiency gains without asking the question that actually matters: if AI handles the reps, how do your people develop judgment?
My doctoral research on leadership resilience keeps returning to the same finding: resilience isn’t a personality trait. It’s a capacity built through accumulated experience with hard things. Take away the hard things and you don’t just lose productivity depth — you lose the mechanism that creates resilient leaders.
This is what I’m calling the experience crisis. And almost nobody is talking about it.