Follow The Wise.....

I disagree with the last line. Based on the following.

If you can recognise that level of knowledge and knowledge awareness in someone else, you must also have it yourself. That would mean that once you get to a certain level, you end up following others who are like you around, and there is no real further development. Therefore, there must be another level of he who knows better, or more than me, since, experience has shown me, there always is.

I think that there should be an extra line.

He who knows he does not know everything, but knows that he knows something that others need to know, and knows how to teach(show/coach/explain to) them - learn from him.

Colin.

This reminds me of three similar attempts to navigate through what we know and don't know etc. All of which I find useful, as is the Arabia quote from you, Kate.

1. Remember the ridicule that was thrown at Donald Rumsfeld when he started talking about threats that we know about and threats that we don't know about. He won a 'foot in mouth' award from the Plain English Campaign for saying this:

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."

The Plain English campaign commented to Reuters, the news agency:

"We think we know what he means. But we don't know if we really know."

Which is a bit unfair. I don't mind an honest giggle at the strange things that have come out of Rumsfeld's mouth in the past, but I think he was unfairly treated on this occasion, as he was following a logical path laid out by Fernando Flores, the father of 'workflow', Chilean Senator, philosopher, computing genius, former Finance Minister of that country, former political prisoner under Pinochet, former transformational change consultant who would charge large companies $1 million if his intervention worked and nothing if it didn't, who divided up what we know and don't know like this:

2. Fernando Flores

"...The World According to Flores exists in three realms. The first is the smallest -- and the most self-limiting: What You Know You Know. It is a self-contained world, in which people are unwilling to risk their identity in order to take on new challenges. A richer realm is What You Don't Know -- the realm of uncertainty, which manifests itself as anxiety or boredom...But it is the third realm of Flores's taxonomy to which people should aspire: What You Don't Know You Don't Know. To live in this realm is to notice opportunities that have the power to reinvent your company, opportunities that we're normally too blind to see. In this third realm, you see without bias: You're not weighed down with information. The language of this realm is the language of truth, which requires trust. "

That's from Harriet Rubin's Fast Company article on Flores back in 1998, which I would link to here, as it's fascinating, but Fast Company have re-organized their website and a earch for 'Flores' on it is coming up with nothing. Aha! I've found it. It's here (It's out of date now, as he is now a politician again back in Chile): Fast Company article on Flores .

Incidentally, I once did some work with the European consultancy that had licensed Flores's methods, including his 'action conversations' method for transforming an organization from a talking to a 'doing' organization, and asked for an example of how Flores' methods can make dramatic change happen by breaking through bureaucratic clutter. They said (and I have never checked this) that as a Senator in Chile Flores pushed through a law that said if a local community petitioned a minister for a local change (a new road or something) and were not given an answer within a deadline - an answer that was properly thought through and reasoned - then the petition was deemed to be granted and the expenditure had to be found. I've probably garbled that, but it is typical of the way Flores focusses organizations on actions - on making commitments and sticking to them.

3. I can't remember where this one came from

But it's a similar thing to Kate's Arabia quote, and I like it a lot. It's supposed to be the learning cycle we all go through all the time

Unconscious incompetence

Conscious incompetence

Conscious competence

Unconscious competence (mastery: the automatic state of flow that maybe a master pianist finds themselves in when giving a performance)

I may even have seen that on David's Changing Mind's website.

The bigger point is that leaders have to be sharply aware of these different realms of wisdom and knowledge, because leaders spend a lot more of their time in the 'unknown' areas - leading people into new territory, helping them/us think new things we hadn't thought before, helping them/us overcome the anxiety and fear of operating in 'unknown' territory beyond our known competence, reminding us to trust ourselves and our judgement and, yes, our wisdom, as Kate points out.