ideasarehere

Currently reading Blink, Malcolm Gladwell helped me discover an interesting phenomenon we’re confronted with on a daily basis: I don’t know. In his context the starting point is a bit different from what I mean, but it leads to the same results.

People are afraid of not knowing. That’s why they they prefer to be the ones asking the questions and not the ones who would give the answer (some might have trouble giving an appropriate answer, but that’s a different story). The common notion is that not knowing is the same as being stupid, which is not the case. In fact, making things up in order to pretend, that’s stupid. “Stupid is as stupid does.”

The worst case scenario is of course when not knowing is combined with passing the buck — and the one who gets it passed does know. Bummer. People are sometimes very likely to manoeuver themselves into trouble by trying to stay out of it the easy way. Maybe it’s because we as a society, or as part of a corporate culture, have ended up believing in the story of zero tolerance for failure. This is the heritage of the industrial age, when a machine had to work flawless 24/7, and manpower was just peripheral in order to feed it.

I think this is not the case any more, so we can stop pretending that it were. But how long it will take for this insight to seep through — I dont’t know.