I received some profound advice recently that was spoken in the context of a check on my personal motivation. It was because Ted Carpenter (Founder and CEO of PersonaVita Inc.) who made this remark, received the same as clarification of his own personal motivation. The issue has to do with coming out of the fog and wanting to do so bad enough that you're willing to acknowledge the real problem first?
Before I share that remark, let me ask about the state of theoretical physics in the 19th century. Where was it, and where was it going? Yes – I know what folks are thinking. Some are wishing that somebody had invented “geek repellent”. Others are wondering how you can possibly get from A to B in this conversation? Still others look at their watches, and justifiably so, as more important things press hard on their focus. Practicality space, not outer space, may be the kind of physics they are most interested in.
But for those whose curiosity is piqued, who haven’t given up, intrigued by this funky sort of comparion, here is that remark
“You don’t even know what you don’t know”.
That’s it, and it’s deep stuff. It’s deep simply because it’s true. All of us are constantly "coming to grips" (mostly in private) with our ignorance and are worried that we’re not doing enough about it. Getting more knowledge, seeing things more clearly, is often a social thing. Yet in our daily public personas we shy away from this private challenge - it doesn’t improve our immediate prospects for promotion. We are all too aware of the fact that we’re mostly clueless. But I' m a strong proponent of the view that real insight comes only from the humbling rediscovery of our ignorance. My father onces said, "When I was 30 I didn't know a damn thing. When I turned 40, I was only half-smart."
W. Edwards Deming put it another way.
“There is no substitute for knowledge”
Years ago I attended a seminar he taught on quality and competitive position. The attendance diploma I received is the only diploma hanging on the wall in my office. My company had the gifted foresight to send me to this once-in-a-lifetime experience. As a company statistician, I successfully justified to upper management that this other and now world renowned statistician was worth listening to. After all, Deming had single handedly (by some accounts) transformed the Japanese economy post WWII, a captivating story of heroic proportions. Besides, we still had a training budget in those days and this seemed like a reasonable expenditure.
So in 1991, at the age of 91, Deming addressed an assembly of over 600 people gathered in the conference room of the Greenville, SC Hyatt Hotel. He began with a question. “I guess you’re wondering why we’re all here?” He stood up and scrawled on the blackboard, “We’re here to have fun!” No one knew exactly how to take that. This was a business conference for pity sake. His 6’ 4” frame was clothed with the typcial professional business attire – his suit actually fit him like socks on a rooster - and symbols of a no-nonsense demeanor. With unusual energy and vitality, he proceeded to teach what he had learned in 50+ years of consulting experience but it had little to do with business, at least not the kind that everyone thought they were there to discuss, and a alot to do with wisdom.
The first thing he presented thereafter was given as if it were an axiom of nature, a universal constant like gravity, or the speed of light. He said,
“It is the right of every worker to enjoy his job and the fruits of his labors.” That's what I remember and I never witnessed any gender bias thereafter.
This is Deming’s initial and fundamental premise, born of 50 years' experience. Imagine if it were a universal constant in the workplace. Who could possibly have a concern about joining a company with such a perspective, if genuine? It is a declarative, however, that few in the boardroom would agree with. Much to the contrary, the mantra of American capitalism of my father’s generation was that “The business of business is business”, a kind of encapsulated commentary on management style that has taken root in this generation at Trump Enterprises.
During the next three days, it was a challenge to keep up with Deming’s display of learning. Experience counts, and though many in the audience didn't agree, it was difficult to discount the strength of his position, his understanding of the "willing worker" that came from workplace experience. Over and over again, as he discussed the challenges of American business to produce goods and services of the highest quality, he muttered in a deep voice of empathetic realization that there is no substitute for knowledge.
Some were growing impatient. “Duh! Everybody knows how important knowledge is, that’s why we're here.” One business manager in attendance, halfway through the first day of training, decided this was a bust and left with his reports. I’m not certain why they left but I can imagine that it had something to do with practicality space. Deming was expounding on his personal philosophy. They hadn’t come to hear Socrates, they came to hear something about business and furthermore Deming was implying that management was the problem. “Typical stuff”, that manager must have snorted on the way back to the airport, “from academic nincompoops who've never struggled in the saddle of management? I mean what Fortune 500 company had he ever managed?"
To be honest, I had a similar impression at first but it seemed almost refreshing that someone of Deming’s stature could throw a few clods at the boss like everybody else felt like doing, without really knowing why of course - OK, well some had a pretty good idea. But I hung on because what he actually said was that leadership was management’s utmost responsibility. This is the grim reality that everyone perceives in the workplace, regardless of background or education. Being the manager, being the boss is not just a “better” job for those climbing the ladder; managers are the only ones who can change anything about the company. The problem is that everyone is just trying to do their best, everyone. How will managers provide inspiring leadership if they don’t know what they are doing? It’s a big problem because the business will live or die on the basis of knowing what the customer wants and knowing how to produce it. How do you know what the customer wants without any data? How do you collect the most important data? How can you make changes in what you’re doing if your only certainty is that what you are doing now isn’t working? Finally, who are the only ones who have decision authority to make those changes? Managers, that’s who. It’s their leadership role.
The truth hurts I suppose, but then what did that manager and his reports come to hear? I’m guessing that they wanted to find out how to become the next Jack Welch. At that time, Darwinian socialism was alive and well in the business of the General Electric Company and like evolution itself was “red in tooth and claw”.
At some point, Deming also said
“It’s not enough to do your best, you must KNOW what to do, and then do your best”.
But it’s not even a matter of doing your very best, if you have no idea about what to do next, whether or not something else would work better. There is, in fact, no substitute for knowledge. Bluster and intimidation is no substitute. Top salaries are no substitute. Hiring the “cream of the crop” is no substitute. It’s even more than having a hunch about what the customer wants. It’s knowing what the customer will want that will grow your business.
OK. So, how do you get that knowledge? How can a company languishing in a market that’s speeding by, keep up? More importantly, how can that company accelerate beyond the market demand in order to look back and chart the course to where the market will be? Well, here’s the secret. There is no formula. How could there be? Such knowledge comes from experience, by being in the thick of it, by struggling with the problems and the issues, by trying designed experiments based on prior knowledge and experience. But most assuredly the first step, and it’s imperative that you do it quickly, is to rediscover your ignorance, because you don’t even know yet, what you don’t know.
It’s a re-discovery you see, because as children we grow up with the humble fascination for what we don’t know. But by the time we become adults, that fascination turns to embarrassment and keeping quiet about it becomes a competitive edge, an effective political strategy, at least for a while. Ignorance to most adults is a very unpleasant state of being and we often hide it, or present the confident pretense instead that we actually know something in the hapless hope that our ruse will never be uncovered. Mark Twain best summarized this timeless attribute of human nature by saying, “Better to remain silent and allow others to think you are a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”.
In the late nineteenth century, theoretical physics was mostly classical Newtonian physics. It was about the fundamental laws of motion and force with an ever growing determination to measure the speed of light or the force of gravity more accurately and precisely. It was struggling to make sense of experimental results on the propagation of electromagnetic phenomena through the medium of material ether. But in 1905, a Swiss patent clerk (third class) managed to publish a paper that passed peer review without a single reference or literature citation. Frankly, there was no precedent for such thinking. Relativity was deduced from two simple and elegant postulates and entered physics departments around the globe as rapidly as it did the English language. Albert Einstein entered the world as a luminary of theoretical physics. The face of the world itself in the 20th century was changed culturally, geographically, politically, economically, and irreversibly. Hypothesis driven research was a premium again. Our wonder and lack of understanding with the cosmos was openly exposed and a flowering of universal thinking in science, systems thinking, was propelled to the covers of major periodicals of the day. The most important outcome of Einstein’s insight was that theoretical physicists, then astronomers, then chemists, then biologists, then ecologists (Oh yes, did I mention statisticians) began to rediscover their ignorance, what it was exactly, that they didn't know.
Now it’s time for the wanderers in the internet ecosystem and the dormant prospectors of social networking science to realize that at present, they don’t even KNOW what they don’t know, ...and we must do it quickly.
