The Power of Not Knowing

Photo by NASA via Unsplash

For much of my career, the word “strategist” was central to my title. While there are a myriad of strategists across various industries, the concept generally holds: the strategist is an individual who uses a particular area of knowledge to chart pathways from problem to solution. From social media to sports, strategists are expert problem solvers.

Yet too often, a career in strategy tends to overemphasize mastering a particular area of expertise and underemphasize the art of problem solving. This is a product of our societal definition of success: We’re taught that experts have answers, that answers beget power. We see it practiced by those around us, so we emulate. This way of operating creates a precarious environment of everyone pretending to have the answer, when beneath the surface everyone is afraid to admit they don’t hold the perfect solve.

By celebrating expertise, we reward the assumption there is a singular “correct” answer that can be unlocked the more knowledge one obtains. We sacrifice critical thinking and experimentation, and as a result truly creative solutions are lacking.

Let the record show I am a recovering perfectionist. The first decade of my career I found great success in playing the role of confident expert. When I returned to work three months postpartum with my first child, my world flipped upside down. Waking every 90 minutes pushed me to a sleep deprived, hormonal brink. Before children, I had the tendency to over-prepare, to show up to the meeting with “the answer”. Now all of a sudden I was showing up ill-prepared, hoping that my colleagues and I could put our brains together to create something. And you know what happened? By showing up with an open mind and full trust in my colleagues, new ideas took hold. New ways of working emerged. By bringing questions instead of answers, I strengthened my problem solving skills and my work got better as a result.

This journey from confident expert to curious problem solver helped me realize that anyone has the capacity to be a strategist. Through Loom, it is our goal to create environments in which more people can discover the solution that is right for them. As a society, we need to stop teaching that there is one way to arrive at the “right answer”, and instead start teaching that there are many different paths to arrive at one of many great ideas.

We’ve started to develop a practice that centers around creating environments that embrace not knowing. The following five principles guide this work:

1. Celebrate curiosity. We can create spaces where people are encouraged to show up with questions, not answers. We embed this practice into our work through subtle shifts in workshop design, placing emphasis within an agenda on discussion and exploration, not the sharing out of predetermined answers. We’ve formalized this by calling some sessions Learning Labs — a simple name change that celebrates learning and experimenting together.
2. Think like an outsider. Creative problem solving is often about looking at a well-known problem with a fresh perspective. We believe anyone can bring a fresh perspective, not just an outside consultant. So we invite all team members to engage in discovery work by exploring a topic of importance they are not an expert in. This encourages individuals to apply concepts from one context to solve another, seemingly unrelated problem.
3. Help diverse perspectives productively collide. We are co-founders with very distinct backgrounds. A corporate MBA and an agency strategist? It could be a recipe for disaster. Yet we’ve learned that while no single person holds the answer, collectively we have the capacity to find new ways forward. We create a similar dynamic in workshops by finding inspiration in the Socratic discussion, where individuals use a case study relevant to their own challenge to practice productively disagreeing with one another.
4. Build trust as a team. Just trust in what your teammates are able to bring to the table. Sounds easy, right? Again, this recovering perfectionist knows it’s not quite that simple. Knowing that trust does not spark overnight, we use experimentation as a safe space for a team to try, fail and learn together. Within the confines of experiments, we encourage the perfectionists in the group to step back and practice playing the role of support, not savior. The result is often one of pleasant surprise upon realizing all their colleagues are capable of.
5. Embrace and learn from the messy middle. Changing the way you work is hard. If you’ve been conditioned to celebrate your expertise, there is no switch you can flip to instantaneously become open to the power of not knowing. We use 1:1 consultative coaching throughout our engagements to deliberately create space to support individuals as they work through the hard, personal bits of embracing change.

In the spirit of embracing the power of not knowing, we are curious — what are we missing? What have you learned about creating safe spaces to problem solve and come up with new ideas? What could we add to or amend in order to create an even stronger approach?