I have been thinking about this, I think in a big part the reliance on tried-and-true formulas is about risk management. The assumption being that what worked before must work again right?
But in a rapidly changing world, if you don't check your basic assumptions of your formulas, you might face some nasty surprises.
The game has changed, what is perceived as low risk actually has a higher and higher risk of failure. And inversely things that seemed very risky before might pay off.
When talking about experience and seniority, I like the definition of experience as being the sum of the mistakes you made.
One assumes that a senior person in the company has made or seen most mistakes made and that makes him/her less likely to repeat it. So that seems like a person worth contracting because they represent a perceived lesser risk of screwing up (of course other factors play too)
In this day and age, with increased complexity, there are ever more ways of screwing up...
What is needed is constant experimentation, which is just as much about learning what doesn't work as finding out what does work. The point of the experiments is that you do it in a way that if it goes wrong, the losses are acceptable.
Companies that are too risk averse however don't allow this experimentation, hence the experience pool remains static.
By not experimenting they are massively increasing risk of screwing up something important because they haven't learned enough quickly enough.
This means that the biggest organisations which are the most rigid actually are the most vulnerable. The average time a company stays in the S&P500 for instance has gone down to 14 years, in company lifetimes that is a blink of an eye.