What if embracing ignorance actually made you a better communicator, mentor, and engineer?
I’m a nerd, so I read nerd things. One such nerd thing is a newsletter called Making the Museum, aimed at designers of museum exhibits and experiences (I like to think that in another life I’d be a curator). A mini-series from earlier this year particularly struck me—it makes the point that it’s beneficial to preserve and cultivate a level of professional ignorance, of ensuring you can distance yourself from knowledge of a subject in order to relate to things the way a visitor would. In doing so, you serve as the conduit between experts and visitors. “Your job is to help those who know too much communicate with those who know too little.”
This springs from the phenomenon known in psychology as the “curse of knowledge.” Once you know something, it’s almost impossible to imagine ever not knowing it.
And we’re absolutely guilty of falling prey to this in engineering. Think of how often we need to explain something to a colleague from another group or specialty (mechanical engineering, flight ops, upper management, whatever) and we struggle, because we can’t figure out how to talk about something to a person who doesn’t have the same puzzle pieces we do.
Jonathan Alger, author of the newsletter, suggests we envision professional ignorance as “a resource, not a shortcoming. It is disciplined curiosity within natural limits.” We want to be an excellent conduit of ideas between our own team and others. We need to not only understand how our knowledge affects our perspective, but also adjust our words and actions to reflect that.
This could take the form of remembering the different layers of knowledge that you need to discuss a problem, and honing the ability to dive down each layer as deep as necessary to make sure you’re understood. A basic example could be stating that “I’ve moved the component in x.” On the surface this feels absurdly simple.
But think about it for a minute. Comprehending this sentence requires knowing that “x” refers to the x-axis, or the lengthwise direction. This fact requires knowing that we’re using a reference frame of three axes to keep track of where aircraft parts are relative to each other. And this requires knowing that we can talk about objects in physical space using a three-dimensional frame of reference. If you’re trying to explain that initial sentence to a person who never learned the foundational concept of a 3-D reference frame, it’ll be like you’re speaking a whole different language—because in a way, you are.
This matters so much in discussions with other disciplines. Maybe it’s more obvious to me because people often half-jokingly think of aerodynamics as black magic. But when you’re explaining why a certain design choice, procedure, whatever, is necessary, you have to be able to meet the level of knowledge of that group.
I may not be able to go into the details of boundary layers and flow separation with an aircraft operator. But I can tell them that at low speeds, the air they’re flying through won’t “stick” to the aircraft’s wings nearly as well and they’ll stall at lower angles than they would usually expect.
The key to this is to do it without being demeaning or patronizing. We never judge someone for having a gap in their knowledge, or poke fun at them as they try to scramble their way to our level. We ought to think of ourselves as belaying down a hole in our layers of knowledge, clipping our colleague onto our rope, and saying “hey, let’s climb up together so you can see what I see.”
This matters even more when thinking about mentorship, especially for junior engineers in our same specialty. The point of mentorship isn’t to flaunt what you know and force someone less experienced to figure it out themselves to keep up with you—though sadly, this still absolutely happens.
It’s meeting that person at their current level of knowledge and climbing up as a team. We want them to connect their learning to their existing understanding, stitching it in so it forms the foundation of the next layer. And to do that, we need to acknowledge the many layers between that junior engineer’s level and where we’ve ended up after years, if not decades, of practice and experience.
You know I love practical takeaways. How can we preserve this novice mindset, overcome our curse of knowledge, and communicate our complex ideas better?
Making the Museum provides seven suggestions, and I really like four of them in particular:
- Capture ignorance early. In our case, that’s identifying the uncertainties, questions, and gaps in our information. It might be as high-level as examining a program’s requirements for what’s not there, or as small-scale as assuming a certain margin of error in a calculation.
- Encourage what might be called “dumb” questions. “Dumb questions gather vital data. They are not embarrassing shortcomings.” They also ensure everyone is on the same page in a discussion. No one will remember the basic question you asked because you weren’t certain of the answer. Everyone will remember the mishap because you were too hesitant to clarify your assumptions before taking action.
- Value not knowing, and being able to admit that. And do your best to find out the answer or help the person who needs to.
- Reset your novice mindset regularly. “Try to get fresh eyes to challenge the project’s clarity.” In other words, seek out others’ thoughts and feedback on your work, especially if you or your team did something in isolation. Show appreciation for that feedback. Other levels of knowledge and points of view will see things that your mind just passes over. The depth of that expertise may amaze you.
Working to embrace this way of communicating doesn’t exclusively serve others. It enriches ourselves at the same time.
Diving down the layers of our own knowledge to explain it to another person helps refresh our own fundamentals, so we stay solid on them going forward. In answering clarifying questions, we may find new connections between ideas we thought we knew well. Or we have our conclusions challenged and either prove them more definitively, or find the gaps in our own assumptions and present even better solutions.
Lots of folks say that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. So it follows that understanding the curse of your own knowledge, peeling it back, and reveling in a little professional ignorance can only make you a better teacher.