The Knowledge Paradox

“When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.”
—Andrew S. Grove, Co-founder of Intel

In other words, “it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.” It is a paradox such that as our collective knowledge increases, such does our expertise, our creativity and innovative ability will tend to plateau or decrease. It is the classic “thinking inside a box,” and the walls thicken with our experience over time.

An essay appearing in the 1989 Journal of Political Economy called this the “curse of knowledge.” Experts in their respective disciplines learn through their daily activities the jargon of their subjects and perform their routine tasks in the ways in which they have always been done. While it is efficient and possesses a concept of utility, it can stifle innovation by taking the path much-taken.

People see the world how they want to see it, since the world revolves around each individual person, through the filters with which they perceive the rest of the world. I’ve written about this before in a few posts. This is why this curse is so pervasive: It can be difficult for people to imagine what the world is like outside their own universe and their own paradigm. As an aside, this is why it can be so difficult to find really, really good trainers and teachers.

Imagine your remote control at home: Anything from your television or stereo remote control to your $1000 remote control. It probably has many more buttons than a reasonable person would need, but they all exist on that remote control because an engineer somewhere in the research, development, or production process determined a use for that button; as described by Chip Heath in a book him and his brother Dan co-wrote in their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Mr. Heath says of this: “People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.”

How can a person fix this?

Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in a team of outsiders, “zero-gravity thinkers” in order to add creativity and innovation to the development mix in her book Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It. “I would ask my very, very basic questions,” making mention of the initial frustration, however transient it may be, with this approach, “it always turned out that we could come up with some terrific ideas.” She finishes her wisdom with: “Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field…Make it possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”

When in doubt, seek the perspective of others to forge your own wisdom in this often-chaotic world! However, in the end know that the decision is your own, and the responsibility of that decision is your own to bear, so weigh each perspective with the value with which it is truly worth!