The power of ignorance

It is easy to assume that in approaching challenges and developing strategies to overcome them that knowledge, expertise, professionalism, and a grasp of best practice are what matter most. The logic and common sense of this would seem to be self-evident. Except that prior knowledge is no guarantee of success.

When in 1976 the ‘founder of modern management’ Peter Drucker was lecturing at Claremont Colleges, he shared something that would make most consultants choke on their PowerPoint presentations. In response to a student asking him about the secret sauce behind his corporate consulting success, he offered a disarmingly simple answer: it was all about asking the right questions. But here's where it gets interesting. When challenged by a student about how he knew which questions to ask - surely this must come from deep industry knowledge? - Drucker's response was revolutionary. He explained that he deliberately avoided drawing on his industry experience or expertise. Instead, he did the opposite - he brought his ignorance to each situation. “Ignorance”, he said, “is the most important component for helping others to solve any problem in any industry”. One can imagine that a great disturbance must have rolled through the lecture hall as if as dozens of young minds had suddenly glitched in total bafflement. Drucker waved off the hands that shot in the air and continued “ignorance is not such a bad thing if one knows how to use it. And all managers must learn how to do this. You must frequently approach problems with your ignorance; not what you think you know from past experience, because not infrequently, what you think you know is wrong”.

For almost fifteen years I was CSO at Wieden+Kennedy. Like Drucker, Dan Wieden was a passionate advocate of ignorance. "The minute you think you know" he once said, "the minute you go – oh, yeah, we’ve been here before, no sense reinventing the wheel – you stop learning, stop questioning, and start believing in your own wisdom, you’re dead. You’re not stupid anymore, you are fucking dead”. Like Drucker, Dan understood that dogma, ideology, and ego narrow our field of vision, and our range of opportunities and chances.

At that same Claremont Colleges lecture, Drucker told a story that illustrates the power of walking in stupid and asking good questions. In 1939, the British were losing thousands of tons of shipping to German submarines. They desperately needed the supplies and munitions these ships carried to feed their population and continue fighting the war. In response, they had designed a cheap cargo ship - slow and bulky, but capable of being built in just eight months. However, building these ships required expertise and skilled workers, and Britain simply didn't have enough shipyards, facilities, and manpower to build the fleet they needed.  Desperate, the British turned to the United States, which wasn't yet in the war and had built only two ocean-going cargo ships in the previous decade. While the British expected it might take about a year to build each ship with their design and guidance, they cast a wide net looking for help, approaching not just shipbuilders but anyone who might assist. One of these contacts was industrialist Henry Kaiser.

Kaiser's company was one of those that built the Hoover Dam, but he knew practically nothing about shipbuilding. However, rather than seeing this as a disadvantage, he approached the challenge from a fresh perspective. Instead of relying on British expertise, he asked himself how to build ships without expert workers. His solution was to redesign the assembly process using prefabricated parts, so workers only needed to learn a small part of the job. He introduced American assembly-line techniques and, unaware that heavy machinery was supposedly necessary for cutting metal accurately, had his workers use simple oxyacetylene torches instead. Similarly, he replaced traditional riveting with welding, which proved both cheaper and faster.

The results were extraordinary. His ‘Liberty Ships’ initially took about a month to build, then just a couple of weeks. In less than four years, 2,710 ships were launched, keeping the vital transatlantic supply routes open and helping pave the way for Allied victory.

What all this points to is that hard though it may be, we should avoid the temptation to believe we already have all of the answers. Zen Buddhism teaches about soshin, which refers to the act of having an open mind, letting go of all preconceived notions, and looking at every aspect of life from a fresh, untarnished perspective. In the West and thanks to Shunryu Suzuki’s book, we’ve come to know it as ‘the beginner’s mind’. It’s harder than it might sound - trying looking at an apple as if you have never seen an apple before, indeed as if you don’t even know it’s an apple. That’s the practice of soshin, the beginner’s mind.

One of the most powerful, and indeed beautiful stories of practising soshin is the story of Jane Goodhall. In 1957 at the invitation of a childhood friend, she visited South Kinangop, Kenya and through other friends soon met the famed anthropologist Louis Leakey, then curator of the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi. Leakey hired her as a secretary.

Leakey believed that a long-term study of the behavior of higher primates would yield important evolutionary information, and because it was the second most intelligent primate, he had a particular interest in the chimpanzee, Despite her having no formal scientific education or even a general college degree, Leakey invited Goodhall to undertake such a study. While many experts objected to Leakey's selection of someone (a woman!) who in their eyes was so ill-qualified, Leakey saw this as an advantage, explaining, "I chose Jane because she had the right personality... she had a mind uncluttered and unbiased by theory.”

Before Jane Goodall’s work, scientists believed that humans were the only toolmakers in the animal kingdom, that chimpanzees were thought to be strictly vegetarian, and that animals didn't have individual personalities or complex emotions. This was at a time when the traditional ethology approach was to conduct short-term studies with large research teams that exercised strict emotional distance from research subjects.

Goodall overturned all of those assumptions. She spent years with the same community of chimps, developed close relationships with her subjects, arguing that understanding their social and emotional lives required closer engagement, and upturned those asumptions and beliefs. 

Through her long, painstaking, and close observation, Goodhall discovered that chimpanzees hunted and ate meat, and were in fact omnivorous. She discovered that chimpanzees used modified twigs to "fish" for termites as well as fashioning other tools. When she reported her findings Louis Leakey famously responded: "Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

She also discovered that chimpanzees had distinct personalities and emotional lives, and demonstrated behaviours previously thought to be uniquely human, such as warfare, adoption of orphans, and long-term family relationships. And she revealed that they lived within complex social systems, with ritualized behaviours, and had a primitive language containing more than 20 distinct sounds. As she explained, "What you see is not always what you get... Only by observing for long periods can you begin to understand.”

Goodhall saw what others had failed to see because she arrived with no assumptions or belief in her own expertise. She just watched without preconceptions or assumptions. One is reminded here of the words of the Indian philosopher, speaker, writer, and spiritual figure, Jiddu Krishnamurti: “In observing there is always the observer. The observer who, with his prejudices, with his conditioning, with his fears and guilts and all the rest of it, he is the observer, the censor, and through his eyes he looks, and therefore he is really not looking at all, he is merely coming to conclusions based upon his past experiences and knowledge. The past experiences, conclusions and knowledge prevent actually seeing.”

We cannot afford to walk in as the confident expert. As the been-there-done-that best-practice wielding guru. For there’s nothing like the belief in our own infallible knowledge to blind us to possibility and narrow our field of vision. We must rebel against the tyranny of what he writer and educator Brad Carter has termed “the assumption stack” - that seductive, oh-so-plausible, internally consistent, taken for granted group of assumptions that we take to be true without actually having proof that it is.

If we believe our job in the development of strategy is to chart new territories and open up new futures, then we cannot simply rely on hand-me-down heuristics and tried-and-tested approaches. We have to let go, if not of our hard earned and learned knowledge, then at least let go of our roles and self-crafted identities as experts. We must walk in humble and allow ourselves the beginner's outlook. We need to see the world as fresh each time and have the courage to ask the unasked questions of it in order to gain new and unpredictable insights.

The renowned British graphic designer Ken Garland has called for “the clarity of the innocent eye”. He writes: “Our proper role is that of the alert ignoramus… Linger for a moment on the synonyms for that admirable little word and I think you’ll see what I’m getting at: active, agile, attentive, careful, heedful, lively, observant, on one’s toes, on the ball, on the lookout, perceptive, sprightly… Now, there’s something to live up to, don’t you think?.. We should – alertly – exploit that original ignorance, or innocence, which allows us to see and perform with clarity.”

Business leaders want honesty, not complicity. They are acutely aware that they’re living in a non-linear world and do not see the trends and dynamics of yesteryear playing out like a straight line into the future. They understand that the past as a solution set cannot be the only viable option and are hungry for a genuinely outside perspective. In such an environment, walking in smart is probably the dumbest thing we can do. But walking in ‘stupid’ and asking the questions that everybody else with their experience and expertise has not thought of asking? That’s probably the smartest thing we can do. Emptying our cup is invariably the first step to filling it with something useful.

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