A funny thing happened this weekend. Barack Obama’s campaign achieved a clean sweep in one primary (Louisiana) and four caucuses (Nebraska, Washington State, the Virgin Islands, and Maine). For Obama, this came on top of several other caucus wins, starting in Iowa. But, hey, hold on a minute, aren’t caucuses supposed to be where the political establishment is strongest? Wasn’t the Iowa caucus where the union machines (Gephardt) and the TV marketing crowd (Kerry) gamed the system to crush Howard Dean? How could the Clinton campaign, staffed with political veterans, blow it so badly?

Kevin Drum reviews a number of plausible explanations and sums up his findings as follows:

Caucuses require organization and Obama was better organized. They require enthusiasm and he has more enthusiastic supporters. They require time, and his demographic has more free time. They’re mostly in small states, and Obama targeted small states. They’re dominated by activists, and activists tend to support Obama.

But again I ask, how did that happen? How did a Clinton team filled with experienced operatives and promoting a candidate whose campaign promotes experience allow itself to be so badly blindsided? Hubris, thinking they’d have it wrapped with big state victories on Super Tuesday, yes, that was part of the problem. But maybe that, too, is only a symptom.

I am leafing through the February 2008 edition of Harvard Business Review, and there my wondering eyes behold “The Experience Trap” by Kishore Sengupta, Tarek K. Abdel-Hamid, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove. The authors studied experienced managers put in charge of complex software development projects. Their subtitle described what they found, “As projects get more complicated, managers stop learning from their experience.” Instead, they write,

managers find it difficult to move beyond the mental models that they have developed from their experiences in relatively simple environments or that have been passed on to them by others. When complications are introduced, they either ignore them or try to apply simple rules of thumb that work only in noncomplex situations. What they don’t do is materially improve the quality of their mental models to take into account the realities of complex projects.

Thus it is that people with experience in one environment so often fail so dramatically when confronted with complexity in another, changed environment. Thus, for example, while Lyndon Johnson knew a lot about Texas and George Bush may have known a little, the one was faced with Vietnam, the other with Iraq. The results were not, and have not been, pretty.

Now I can’t help wondering if the Clinton campaign has fallen into its own experience trap–and whether the country might be better off because it has.

UPDATE: If you missed Obama on 60 minutes, do catch him here.