Don’t Know. Don’t Know.
January 6, 2020
Being open, particularly to the idea of not knowing, is the first step to overcoming one's natural biases.
TRANSCRIPT
There are things that we know that we know that we know. Right? We apply them. There are things that we don't know.
And if we want to know them, we learn them. And then there's that whole other part of the all available knowledge, which we call what we don't know that we don't know. And the key to this is to access that area. And if you if we go back to the future that's coming at us, the environment that that is disrupted and and unpredictable, we really wanna manage for what we don't know that we don't know.
We want to be able to stand in not knowing and and create breakthroughs. So, access to breakthroughs lies in what we what what's not seen. So that may sound very how do we know what we don't know? Or how do we keep accessing what we don't know?
Many years ago, I was working in a paper mill.
So this particular mill was having an issue with tearing. So they're running the the machine and everything's working and all of a sudden the thing would rip, and this has cost them a lot of money. They believed you could say they knew that, somebody wasn't doing something right. So you could say they had a story about what was happening. So they knew that it must be the guys on the night shift or they knew that it might it must be happening because somebody wasn't following the the protocols.
But no matter what they did, when they went after what they knew was the problem, it still wasn't getting better. It would get better for a little while and then boom, it would it would rip again.
So one of the supervisors said, you know what? How about if we approach this like we don't know what the problem is? It's not it's nobody's fault but we don't know. Let's just let's just be interested. Let's be in the question that we don't know what it is.
So when he did that, his eyes opened up, and he started walking around. He literally just was walking around and looking. Walking around and looking. He looked up at the ceiling, he would look down at the floor. He's just kind of observing what's happening from not knowing.
And at one point he was kind of like standing somewhere and he sees a part of the ceiling just like crumble and fall onto the wet newsprint.
So they set up a video camera on that point and they watched it and sure enough enough stuff was falling in that it was causing the paper to be weak and rip.
Can you see that when he knew or when they knew what the problem was, they didn't ask any questions?
So one of the things about getting into the ‘don't know’ is and this is what can be very difficult for teams or for leaders in particular, any of us, is that we know so much about why something isn't working or what the problem is that we kinda go after that as a solution instead of staying open.
