CHAPTER 3

Embrace Your Ignorance

You must unlearn what you have learned.¹

—YODA, IN STAR WARS: EPISODE V—THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Imagine every movie you’ve seen in which the main character is out to learn some ancient secret, master a complex martial art, or climb something really tall. They meet their quirky or enigmatic teacher and, after convincing the master to teach them, their training begins. The main character is impatient and tries to achieve the task quickly, using the habits and thinking they have brought from their past. Of course, they fail in some spectacular or hilarious fashion, and the master shakes their head, sighing slowly as they attempt to muster their own patience for their pupil.

Now these stories usually end happily: The martial artist kicks the villain really hard, or the magician levitates the giant thing. Roll credits.

Where did all of these students finally catch traction and enter the happy part of the training montage? The turning point was that they let go of their old thinking and habits. They realized they were on the frontier of understanding, and the assumptions they formed from past experience were detrimental. They embraced their ignorance, and committed themselves to learning what they wished to master by starting from the basics and working up, rather than demonstrating what they believed they knew.

Great problem-solvers know that they must become masters of the unique problem and the process it affects, and that when they walk into a new situation they must be more focused on learning what they do not yet know than demonstrating the knowledge they already have. They ask questions others might think are stupid, and challenge what “everyone knows” to make sure they have the facts.

Embracing one’s ignorance isn’t easy. In many cases we already know 90% of what is required to solve a problem, so it’s reasonable to start from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance: People are asking you to solve the problem because of what you know, rather than what you don’t. However, it is the last 10% that lies between you and an elegant solution.

WHY WE HIDE OUR IGNORANCE

Early in my career I would often find myself in a new business that I knew nothing about. Power and respect flowed with experience and tenure, and you were expected to know all the insider language and acronyms. While both experience and shared language serve a purpose to help an organization function well, they can also raise barriers when looking to solve hard problems.

When we were in our first introductory meeting, there might be five or 10 people who would go around a table and say their name, their role, and how long they had worked at the business or in the industry. Mostly they had been in their fields since before I was born. What I learned was that you can’t be defensive or try to hide your ignorance. When it was my turn to speak I would always explain that it was my second hour on-site and that I was looking forward to learning more.

Some people, when they hear something they don’t understand, ask “What’s that?” and they get to learn; others will hold back or nod along because they’re worried they’re supposed to know what they’re hearing—then they’re lost. I was reminded of this last week when the acronym “CYOA” was used in a presentation. Well I had no idea what this meant. Was it Cover Your Own Ass? Was it the Caribbean Yacht Owners Association? I asked and it stood for something else—a shame, as for a moment there I thought I was going sailing! In business we are faced with this all the time, and the best problem-solvers simply ask what everything means.

Often we’re afraid to admit what we don’t know, even to ourselves: It is comforting to imagine that we already have a good idea of the solution to our problem and can take action. This need for comfort is of course reinforced in our upbringings, where we are rewarded for having the right answer now and taking action immediately.

This all raises an interesting question around parenting. Part of your job as a parent is to guide your children, to provide them with basic knowledge, such as:

“Can I drink this?”

“No, it’s poison.”

Or:

“Is it okay to run around with this toilet brush?”

“I think it’s best not to.”

And kids are great believers in their parents. But where do you draw the line between giving them your best guess of how something works and helping them gain knowledge, and making it appear like one always has an answer to something, rather than admitting we don’t know and looking something up? Fortunately, smartphones and the ability to check something out on Wikipedia means it’s easier than ever to demonstrate searching for knowledge rather than retaining data in your head.

And asking questions can also be emotionally difficult. People are afraid to look stupid in front of peers and friends, colleagues, and clients. Imagine you’re at a party and someone you’ve met calls your name as they approach you from the table of snacks. “Nat! So good to see you again!” For a quarter-second, you freeze. Uh oh: I don’t know this guy’s name. But you play it cool. “Hey! How’s the…” You check his ring finger, and there’s a wedding band. Excellent. “Family?” He smiles, grateful that you’re thinking about him, and tells you all the great stuff his kids are up to. You sigh in relief: bullet dodged. Now you just have to wait for someone to say his name, and this time you’ll remember.

I’ve done this before, because I’ve just been too embarrassed to say, “Oh gosh can you remind me of your name?” And I know the longer that I pretend to know and don’t just ask the guy (or someone else) his name, the more I’m going to look like a complete buffoon if I get into a situation where someone’s expecting a name and I can’t provide it. Take the hit to your pride and solve the problem.

Ultimately, it is fear of being “exposed” that causes many people to hide behind their ignorance and accept poor problem-solving. There’s a fear of public failure when you commit yourself or your resources to solving a hard problem. Even when diving into a problem, there’s a fear of looking ignorant or “stupid” by asking questions one is “supposed to know.”

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE HIDE BEHIND IGNORANCE

Just as was the case for me at that party, many nascent problem-solvers will run away from or cope with their ignorance of a problem. I’ve seen smart people run away from problems in logistics, IT, sales growth, and safety by immediately calling in and passing the buck to subject matter experts because the would-be problem-solvers are afraid of their ignorance—more on this in Chapter 6, “Don’t Rely on Experts.”

I remember working with a business that made and packaged food for grocery stores. At the end of a production line the product was put into cardboard boxes for shipping and then carried on down the line to be sealed up and stacked on a pallet. They had an automatic box-closing machine to seal the cases, but I noticed someone standing at the conveyor just before it all day, prefolding the flaps of the boxes, because sometimes the automatic box closer did not work. I nicknamed this position the “box-blesser.”

What’s wrong with this solution? Well, it obviously takes someone away from doing more useful work. And imagine how boring that job must be. The box-closing machine had some trouble a few years earlier, and it made sense to put someone in that role temporarily to make sure the production line ran that day. But everyone had run away from the fact that they did not understand how to make the automatic box-closing machine work again, so the box-blesser became a permanent position.

I was in the fortunate position of being naturally ignorant, and when I arrived, the person prefolding the box flaps seemed odd to me. I embraced my ignorance and asked, “Why is that person there?” When it was explained to me, I asked, “What happens when we run boxes through without the prefolding?” Nobody was sure, so we tried it, and learned a lot about the problem by watching it occur.

I noticed that many of the boxes went through and were sealed without any issue. I was also able to figure out where in the machine the jams did occur, and therefore saw quickly what changes needed to happen to allow the machine to work well every time. The first step to solving this problem came from embracing and running towards what we didn’t know.

Another business was having trouble retaining high-level management positions, and just kept increasing salaries and benefits in the hopes that they would keep good people, when the underlying root cause was the sense of autonomy and meaning these people found in the work. Nobody wanted to ask them why they were leaving; perhaps it was uncomfortable. But as soon as the exit interviews were changed, they found the root cause and were able to get started fixing it. But for years, the HR department was afraid to approach the problem from a position of “fresh eyes” ignorance and ended up losing great talent because of it.

Next is one of my favorite company myth stories, and it involves “dinosaur hair.” A large industrial facility in the energy industry had a process step that required product to be forced through small nozzles to purify it. Apparently, production was limited because the nozzles clogged up with dinosaur hair that was in the material when the oil was formed. I don’t know how the dinosaur hair was supposed to have survived the geological processes required to make oil or whether dinosaurs even had hair, but I do know that the financial impact of these clogs was very large.

This legend served an important function in the business. It freed people from having to figure out a solution to the problem. In some ways it was a solution to the political side of the clogged nozzle problem: it subtly rebranded the problem from “clogged nozzles” to “dinosaur hair.” After all, does anyone have a solution for dinosaur hair? It would need to be something unlikely, such as borrowing a Tardis from Dr. Who and a large razor from Conan the Barbarian.

How do you make progress in these situations? After all this oil production facility was a huge place filled with very competent staff who had plenty of advanced degrees in things few people understand about the petrochemical industry. But far from being unusual, this is a very common situation in all walks of life. People are socialized not to “challenge” what respected people believe.

What stories exist in your life that prevent you from approaching your fear of the unknown?

EMBRACE YOUR IGNORANCE, THEN SLAY IT

A great problem-solver will gently challenge the organization rather than individuals, and have the humility to lead by example, by demonstrating their ignorance.

Imagine this scenario:

“What is this material?”

“Dinosaur hair.”

“Have we chemically analyzed it to determine what it is?”

“Well, no.”

As I’m sure I foreshadowed with a bit of a heavy hand, the clogging material was not dinosaur hair. It was, in fact, a man-made fiber being mistakenly introduced into the process at the facility. Smashing the “dinosaur hair” myth by embracing ignorance got this excellent team on track to rapidly solve the problem.

Moving towards the true cause of a problem is going to require fresh eyes that want to learn. This is why outside problem-solvers sometimes have an advantage with hard problems over those familiar with the system: A common cognitive bias is the “curse of knowledge,” where our brains assume that the problem we’re looking at is similar to something we’ve seen in the past.

Great problem-solvers aren’t afraid of their ignorance, and they’re not afraid of others seeing it. Great questions shatter assumptions, provoke new insight, and position those that do know about the process or system to contribute their expertise. Great problem-solvers build confidence and don’t need to position themselves as all-knowing (see Table 3.1). They know that nobody is all-knowing about any process, and this is particularly true of something highly complex. Nobody alone knows enough about an F-22 Raptor or the global financial system to solve its many problems without asking some great questions.

I remember when I was 19 at an internship in Los Angeles. One of the guys there, Dr. Mack Quan, gave me a lot of good advice, but one story he told really stuck in my head. “When you’ve received your bachelor’s degree, you think you know everything. Once you get your master’s, you realize you don’t know anything. When you get your PhD, you realize nobody really knows anything.” This is a great story to remember when approaching novel problems. For some reason, realizing that no one else really knows a lot about things helps me jump in with both feet.

But great problem-solvers don’t just admit their ignorance. They embrace it. They understand that introducing a little bit of smart ignorance into a problem-solving effort will get people asking questions for which they assumed they already had answers. Great problem solvers use their ignorance to help experts close to the problem or process to explain their understanding thoroughly, and in that explanation sort out fact from assumption. Often, the effort of merely explaining a complex process to a smart, ignorant person actually causes the people closest to the problem to develop new understanding and insight.

Once in the late ’90s I found myself working in a factory that made toothpaste tubes that went to other factories for filling, and they weren’t able to meet customer demand. They made these tubes by forming a cylinder, chopping it to length, and then welding on the threaded top using induction welding. When they ran the machine near its rated speed, the welds would burn the tubes, and they had to be thrown out. Running slower made the quality problem go away, but then they couldn’t produce enough.

I had some theoretical knowledge of induction from college, but no idea how it worked in practice. I asked a lot of questions of the operators, mechanics, and managers. They explained that when they slowed the machine, they could turn down the power of the induction welder, so it wouldn’t burn. I didn’t understand it all, so I read the manual at the hotel overnight. I can’t remember the technical details now, but a section on the “shape of the waveform” taught me what I needed: It just required embracing my ignorance and hunting out the answers. I shared this section with the operators and mechanics, and we were able to go faster by significantly increasing the power of the welder, but for a shorter period of time so there was no time to burn: the opposite of the strategy previously applied.

The mechanics ultimately didn’t understand how the welder worked, but they were afraid to admit their ignorance to themselves or others. They probably had not picked up the manual in a long time, but the key insight to understand what needed to change was right there.

Being willing to expose your ignorance can be hard, until you learn the costs of not doing so.

DO YOU KNOW HOW TO BUILD A DECK?

A number of years ago we decided to build a deck off the back of our home, so I dutifully purchased a “how to build a deck” book. My wife figured I might need a little more practical understanding, so she signed me up for a two-session deck-building school at Home Depot. I am sure it was not because she was nervous!

I like these opportunities to explore new skills and was not afraid to get stuck in and learn how to practically apply my largely theoretical knowledge. I was the only engineer in the course and most of my peers thought it was a joke that I was taking it. Of course, as an engineer I should be able to figure this out on my own, right? But I doubt any of them knew how to build a deck, and of course many would not want to admit this.

As it happens, I learned a lot about deck building and it was especially useful for the more tricky parts, such as cutting stringers for the stairs. I “passed” the course and even got a merit badge—like boy scouts get for demonstrating a skill. It was great fun and super fulfilling. I went on to build more decks and help friends put them in. You can do a lot when you’re willing to admit you don’t really understand something. Having a spouse who can help you understand these gaps is also helpful!

NOW: EMBRACE YOUR IGNORANCE

Go and look up something that you don’t really understand as well as you would like. Something you bluff your way through. It might be how the clutch works on a manual car or which country has the third largest population.

Also, next time someone mentions something and you don’t know what it is, stop and ask them. In fact, do that even if you are certain you do know. Practice feeling comfortable acquiring knowledge.