Experience is a wonderful thing—until it isn’t. In fact, experience might just be the silent saboteur of innovation. For years, I led creativity and innovation at Disney, where the most seasoned voices in the room—mine included—could unintentionally become the biggest roadblocks to fresh thinking. Why? Because we’d fallen into what I call the “River of Thinking,” a mental current shaped by past successes, deep expertise and industry norms. It’s comfortable. It’s predictable. And it’s exactly what keeps new ideas from surfacing.

How The River Of Thinking Drowns Innovation

Picture this: You’re in a brainstorming session. Someone floats an unusual idea, and the reflexive response is “No, because…” What follows is a laundry list of logical objections. You’ve just witnessed the River of Thinking in action.

As leaders gain experience, they accumulate more reasons why things won’t work. That’s not pessimism—it’s pattern recognition. But the danger is that those patterns can become ruts. They narrow our field of vision until the only ideas that survive are the safe, familiar ones.

I’ve always prided myself on fostering a safe space for ideas, never shooting down an idea and instead seeing where we can take it from there. But even with the best intentions, I’ve seen how quickly teams default to dismissing bold new thinking—not because the ideas are bad, but because they don’t fit the mold of “how we’ve always done it.”

To learn more about the “Naive Expert” and how to shift your mindset, read the rest of my article over on Forbes.com.

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