Delightful Ignorance As a Sign of Expertise
On the first day of senior year in high school, the AP English teacher asked me to drop her class because she thought my behavior was too disruptive. (It’s a long story, but I guarantee you that I wasn’t at fault.) As a result, whenever there’s a reference to Shakespeare in culture or conversation, I’m often the one person who doesn’t get it.
It took me 43 years to see Star Wars. To be fair, I was a young child during some of that time, but it definitely put me at a disadvantage in terms of critical cultural knowledge.
This summer, while catching up with friends, someone mentioned the sequel to the Black Panther movie. I asked earnestly, “They made a second Black Panther?” They couldn’t believe I didn’t know about it. The belief was that everyone should have been aware of something so central to the culture.
My counterargument was that we often assume what we know is commonly understood by everyone else. But the reality is that the amount of information any one of us has is tiny compared to the knowledge that exists. Essentially, our assumption should be that most people don’t know what we know. While I’ve got massive gaps in my pop culture knowledge, I could do mini-TED Talks on esoteric topics like page margins in business memos (“Don’t Crowd Me, Bro”) or typography in slide design (“Calibri Font Is a Scourge on Mankind”), but it surely wouldn’t be fair to assume that everyone else knows or cares about those subjects!
The conversation was a reflection of one of my increasingly prominent old-man tendencies: comfort with being delightfully ignorant of things that fall outside my areas of expertise. Rather than the slight embarrassment of my younger years, I now have zero shame in saying, “never heard of that” or asking an elementary question about those topics.
I first realized that growing comfort with relative ignorance after talking to a friend who is a scientist and professor. He described his journey in academia as one of honing in on a narrow area of expertise, so much so that you can push the world’s knowledge in that space. But on that journey, two things happened. First, defining the four lines around his expertise meant accepting that everything outside of that box would be areas of relative weakness—and that’s ok. Critically, he said that having others acknowledge him as an expert meant that he could relax his ego about everything else. His confidence in his “power alley” gave him freedom to simply be curious elsewhere.
Recently, I relayed that story to a CEO who was concerned about a team member who would come across as a know-it-all because he would offer judgments and perspectives in areas where he had no obvious expertise or historical knowledge. As we talked, she realized his behavior may not have been arrogance at all. Instead, it may have come from a combination of (a) being in an expansive role in which he might assume he’s supposed to have clear perspectives on far-flung issues or that people were looking to him for answers, and (b) being younger and having not yet identified the power alley in which he could feel confident of making an important contribution.
In other words, it was an insecurity and uncertainty about his expertise that caused him to cosplay as an expert.
The CEO also realized that this behavior carried an important implication for her leadership—and, I think, for all leaders. We shouldn’t assume that people naturally understand their power alleys. Often, that’s because leaders don’t give as much praise as they do constructive feedback, and because most organizations use performance frameworks that implicitly encourage being a generalist. There’s more conversation about addressing weaknesses than on cultivating the signature capabilities, even though the latter will disproportionately drive impact over time.