Ignoramus: The Power of Productive Ignorance

We’ve all heard that knowledge is power, but admitting your ignorance is a necessary step to knowledge.

So says Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens. As he says, the Scientific Revolution could not begin until a few brave souls dared to openly admit their ignorance, saying in effect, ignoramus, which is Latin for “we don’t know.” Freed from certainty dictated by rulers and priests, a few individuals here and there began questioning, observing, experimenting, and discovering, and ultimately ignited an explosion of progress and wealth, and almost every aspect of human life was fundamentally and irrevocably changed, mostly for the better.

On a more modest level, I’d like to ask how much our lives would change today if we were all willing to say ignoramus a bit more.

I see the value of admitting ignorance in two different ways in my classes. The first form is when I get a grizzled sales veteran sitting with his (it’s always a man) arms crossed as if saying; “I know it all. I dare you to try to teach me something I don’t know.” Those usually turn out to the easiest to teach, but only after I’ve asked a question or two about their accounts that they can’t answer. They often do a complete 180 when they recognize they don’t know something, and see its importance.

Second, I always stress that what kills sales deals—and I suspect much else in business and in life—is the seductive certainty that you have the situation under control because you know all you need to know. Ignorance is productive when it exposes what Donald Rumsfeld called the unknown unknowns, or as I call them,  (DK)².  But the most insidious form of (DK)² is the assumption, where you think you know but you really don’t. The only cure for the assumption is to admit to yourself what you don’t know.

I don’t pretend to be perfect yet; I still have trouble admitting my ignorance. Just this week I was in a meeting where a speaker threw out a term I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to show my ignorance so I sat quietly, but a woman in the group stopped him and said, “What do you mean by that?” Turns out no one else in the room know either. In times like that’ it’s useful to remember what Will Rogers said, “Everybody’s ignorant, only on different subjects.”

In selling, there is tremendous value in admitting to others that you don’t know. I learned my first big lesson in sales when a prospect asked me why he should do business with my company, and I surprised him (and myself) by saying, “I don’t know.” That frank admission led to an open and productive conversation and a big sale.

What about relationships? Ignoramus makes us humble, and hence quicker to listen and slower to judge. It helps us avoid the fundamental attribution error, in which we impute others’ wrong actions to their character, while we excuse our own wrong actions as being caused by the situation. If we get into the ignoramus habit, we would be more likely to think a little deeper about the causes of the other person’s misbehavior. As Lincoln said, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”

This one I know will never happen, but how would politics change if everyone was more willing to admit their ignorance? Certainty wraps you in a comfortable cocoon of confirmation bias and closes your mind to anything that might challenge your worldview. Is it any wonder there doesn’t seem to be anything getting done in Washington these days?

Ignoramus, what a wonderful and useful word when it’s directed not at others but at ourselves! How much more would we know if we admitted what we don’t?