How Strategic Ignorance can break the curse of Knowledge to Drive Innovation

I get it — at a glance, the phrases ‘strategic ignorance’ or ‘curse of knowledge’ may seem like a bit of a contradiction — kind of like putting ‘informed political discourse’ and ‘Facebook newsfeed’ together.

However, there is a case for intentionally bringing people together from disparate backgrounds to innovate on a topic for which they have no direct experience, as opposed to (or at least in addition to) relying on subject matter experts to create ground-breaking innovations.

Most publications on strategic ignorance focus on the often malicious intent for plausible deniability (think Nixon with Watergate). But what if strategic ignorance could be used for good to generate plausible innovation — creating ideas so far out of the normal realm of possibility that experts would struggle to make the initial association. Intentionally leveraging outside voices — or strategically ignorant individuals — could be a shortcut to the ideas that fundamentally transform, instead of just incrementally improve, an industry. Let’s explore why.

The Curse of Knowledge

If a gravel road has ever been part of your driving routine, you know that the longer you drive down the same path, the more the rocks break down, making the ride incrementally smoother and allowing you to drive back and forth to the same destination faster. With each trip, taking an alternative route becomes increasingly bumpier in comparison to the known path.

Domain knowledge is like driving down a gravel road. The more you know about a given topic, the more efficiently you can navigate it and identify optimization opportunities within it — breaking down the figurative gravel into smaller and smaller pieces. With enough knowledge, you become a subject matter expert and others start to see the path you’ve created in the gravel and want to follow it. That’s a good thing, society needs experts to lead us down proven paths to known destinations.

However, the challenge with a well-worn path is that external disruption eventually comes, like heavy rain for a road or a new startup for an industry. When that happens, as most country songs explain, the well-worn path quickly becomes mud, and continuing down it creates ruts. Hence, the more you rev the engine to try and go the same path that’s always worked before, the more stuck you become until the well-worn path is rendered useless, blockaded by the same vehicles that once made it such a smooth ride (think Kodak leaning into film after the advent of digital cameras).

If you’re still with me and not humming along to your favorite country music ballad at this point, there are three main innovation obstacles created by expertise, each of which rational ignorance can counteract: entrenched conceptual models, which are reinforced by reputation risk, which lends itself to unnecessary complexity.

Before addressing each, it’s worth prefacing that there is some foundational knowledge required in a field to innovate in it — but not as much as one might think. In one popularized innovation experiment, kindergarteners consistently outperformed MBAs, CEOs, and lawyers at constructing marshmallow and spaghetti towers — despite eating a portion of their supplies in the process!

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Entrenched conceptual models

“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” — Albert Einstein, adapted from Socrates

Experience shapes a conceptual mental model of how things are done and what’s possible or impossible, resulting in an often useful and well-informed skepticism. This skeptical mental model is based on knowing what has been tried and failed in the past, as well as the complexities of what’s required to implement new ideas.

While skepticism is useful to prevent wasted resources on initiatives with low chances of success, it can also kill many nascent ideas that just need some iteration to become useful.

Mental models are such strong forces that — even if acknowledged — they are difficult to escape. For example, have you ever sat at a puzzle for a while unable to find any more pieces, becoming increasingly convinced that the manufacturer has made a mistake in production, and then someone else sits down and starts getting multiple pieces seemingly at first glance? My sister does this to me every family Christmas gathering. This frustration stems from my mental models of where certain pieces can and can’t go based on past attempts and careful observation of the board, but my sister — unconstrained by my same beliefs — can make progress much faster.

An expert’s knowledge of constraints, which shape their conceptual models, are not only difficult to think outside of, but they can also be difficult to update with new developments in exponentially evolving external forces like customer needs and receptivity, competitor and marketplace trends, technology capabilities and costs, regulatory changes and investor preferences.

This is not an argument to replace experts and institutional knowledge with novices to make decisions, but early-stage innovation ideas will be stymied without a diverse set of voices to break knowledge’s curse of entrenched conceptual models. Bringing together a variety of thinkers — each competent in their own fields — generates non-lateral thinking, which connects ideas from across industries based on each person’s unique experiences. Stanford Professor Martin Ruef’s research validated this concept, finding that creativity is bolstered by diverse fields of expertise.

In the words of billionaire entrepreneur Sara Blakeley: “When you don’t know how it’s supposed to be done, that means you’re going to do it differently.”

Different isn’t necessarily good, and experts can help sift through which is which, but for truly innovative ideas, different is a good place to start.

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Reputation Risk

“The larger they are, the harder they fall.” — Boxing Axiom

If you’ve ever seen Rocky III (cue the training montage soundtrack), you’ll recall how Rocky’s trainer, Mikey, secretly set up his fights against lesser contenders once he became the Heavyweight Champion of the World. Once Mr. T came into the picture as a real risk to Rocky’s title, Mikey advised Rocky against the fight. Why?

Because there is generally an inverse relationship between what you have to gain and what you have to lose.

Rocky, as the wealthy and famous world champion, had nothing more to gain and everything to lose from a truly challenging fight. But for Mr. T, as the young up-and-comer, no one expected him to beat the reigning champion. So, if he lost, his reputation wouldn’t change much, but if he won he would take over the world champion title.

Unfortunately, most cultural norms do not celebrate failure as learning opportunity. So, the higher an expert’s prestige, the less incentivized they are to try something new, since new things — by nature of their newness — have unknown outcomes and could fail, damaging the expert’s reputation.

The challenge with a reputation-protecting, risk-averting approach to innovation is the plethora of research validating that:

Quality ideas most often stem from a large quantity of ideas.

Therefore, the fear of tarnishing one’s reputation with an unsuccessful idea will hinder the iterative innovation process of getting to the next successful idea.

Van Gogh, in his 10 short years as an artist, created over 900 paintings, which equates to a new piece of art about every 36 hours. In Mozart’s 30 years of writing music, he composed over 600 works, or about a new piece every other week. Not every Van Gogh is sold for the same amount nor is every Mozart composition played by premiere orchestras today.

The point is that the greater the selection of ideas (or paintings or orchestras), the more selective one can be for curating the best of the batch. As Wharton researchers explain in their findings that creativity is a byproduct of occupational diversity: “the five tallest people in a city of one million people will be taller than the five tallest people in a city of 10,000 people.”

A room full of experts in the same field struggle with the creative constraints of how they are perceived by their peers from their ideas, but a diverse room of competent, rationally ignorant individuals have less at stake from how they’re perceived by others for their ideas, leading to more ideas from which experts can iterate to generate relevant innovation.

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Unnecessary Complexity

“Simplicity is the highest form of sophistication.” — Leonardo Da Vinci

Related to but separate from entrenched conceptual models and reputation risk, there is a cultural misconception that complexity is a mark of expertise. The consulting industry is known to struggle with this curse of knowledge, using complex graphs, formulas, and interconnected diagrams, interspersed with ‘consulting speak’ (words like synergistic, optimization, and paradigm) to sound impressive without creating much progress.

While recognizing and navigating complexity is a necessary component of the innovation process and a helpful tool to narrow down which ideas to implement, perceived complexity can also limit initial ideas presented and often inhibit elegant solutions. It’s rational to think that complex problems necessitate complex solutions, and tempting to be the one who creates such a complex solution that only a few can understand it, bringing about a sense of elitism and job security.

However, the most innovative ideas simplify complexity.

If you disagree, look no further than your phone. In a world of flip phones and then BlackBerrys, with keyboards becoming increasingly complex as mobile capabilities increased, the iPhone helped standardize the touchscreen, allowing for only the most relevant buttons to be displayed for the user’s current needs.

Expert knowledge of outlier circumstances can be a blocker to otherwise simple solutions. But when straightforward improvements work for 80% of use cases, they are likely worth implementing, and less elegant solutions can be built over time to address outliers. Plus, if for nothing else but risk mitigation, isn’t it in an organization’s best interests to attempt simple solutions first before investing in complex ones?

In Summary

Leveraging rational ignorance to address the curse of knowledge is one tool in an innovator’s repertoire, but simple awareness of the blind spots that expertise creates can help counteract them as well.

Thankfully, leveraging rational ignorance in an innovation process is rather straightforward. Simply bring together a diverse group of competent individuals, give a simple overview of the problem (without your vision of how to solve it), and let them dream. Of course, the initial ideas will likely be easy to dismiss as irrelevant or an oversimplification, but remember that innovation — by definition — is something different from the status quo, so lean into the newness, the quirkiness, and even the absurd, because iterating on those new directions can very well lead to the next industry-shaping transformation.

Let me know if any takeaways resonate with you, and with which you disagree.

Thanks for giving this a read!