Power of Ignorance, Especially for Leaders

Ignorance is stupid. But ignorance is a prerequisite of wisdom, especially for those who are at leadership position. When you don’t have answers to critical questions from people in your organization, how often do you honestly say “I don’t know” instead of convincing people with your hypothetical scenario with position power?

Leaders are generally defined as those who envision the future, enable organization, engage and energize people, as well as the leaders themselves to execute important tasks with people — the 5 E’s of leaders. This model will hold true in future.

However, the definition above lacks the most critical element of leaders, especially in the era of artificial intelligence that replaces many of the tasks that we human beings do today.

In the era of AI, the crucial role of leaders is to find something outside of collective knowledge of human that might be useful and meaningful. It’s the leader of troops marching into unknown territory. Leaders need to recognize what we don’t know. Recognizing your own ignorance requires humility and open mindedness, because we only see the things we understand. For a long time, human did not recognize the air around us, spherical earth, gravity, bacterias and viruses, molecules, atoms and quantum.

AI will never be able to recognize its ignorance. Human can see ignorance, if one is prepared to do so. Marching toward unknown needs humbleness. However, truth be told, many of us fall in a trap of not doing so, because we are too busy finding useful information out of the astronomical amount of information flood.

The trap is that leaders are fixated to set a vision, build strategy and plan toward the goal. Human can envision only within the domains of what we already know, or at most what we can imagine, i.e., science fiction. One can write a sound plan and build robust strategy to achieve goal based on existing knowledge, say your own expertise and aggregated knowledge of your organization. The leaders in this type are effective in achieving pre-determined goals of 20th century. However, they are guaranteed to fail in 21st century, because such leaders will never take organizations to untapped territory. Moreover, soon or late, envisioning, planning and strategizing will be done much better and faster by algorithm-based self-learning machines using big data.

What will be the role of human leaders in 21st century? The 1st key is experimentation. With your vision or dream or customer needs, do something different, something you haven’t done before. Observe what happens. If the result matches with what you hoped, don’t be excited. You just confirmed what you already know. In most cases, someone somewhere in the world had already filed a patent or had made a commercial product on the exact same idea already. Enrico Fermi, the Nobel laureate in Physics said “an experiment that successfully proves a hypothesis is a measurement; one that doesn’t is a discovery.”

The 2nd key is to look into very details of unexpected results and failed outcomes. Think critically what an unexpected result means and observe how things failed. If you realize something new, whether it is an alternative direction to do further experiments, or new way to interpret the observation, or different idea to apply the findings to something practical, that’s the crucial step to go outside of collective knowledge of human. The crucial step may be very small, such as Steve Jobs finding scratches on the iPhone prototype with plastic screen, or can be humongous in case the eureka moment for Issac Newton looking at an apple falling from tree. The size of impact doesn’t matter. The importance is to get out of status quo and your comfort zone in one step at a time, and this is only possible by experimentation. Said differently, try and error with empirical observations, and repeating these is the only way to get outside of your own cognition and collective knowledge of human.

Leaders are those who recognize ignorance, act heuristically and engage everyone to the learning journey toward wisdom. In 21st century, this becomes ubiquitous requirement to be the leaders in all fields, not just for innovators and entrepreneurs, but also in businesses, governments, arts, non-profits and volunteering organizations.