Not Knowing

We are terrified by not knowing 

But as we saw with Plenty Coup, he went on living even though he couldn’t see across the bridge between the two worlds when he first began to cross it (and even though he never recovered his fundamental sense of his original identity).

As Adam Grant points out in his latest book Think Again, in age of Acceleration Unlearning is more important skill than Learning. Given this, Not Knowing just got a whole heck of a lot more useful or adaptive than it ever has been. Think back on your own history. For most of our lives in school and at work, we were punished for not knowing and rewarded for Knowing.   (Next Level Leadership is strange like that. What was down is up and what was up is now down).

Consider this

We are terrified of not knowing. Yet 14B years of history tells us we can trust not knowing.   Things have been on an evolutionary course from Simple to Complex in every domain since the beginning of our expanding Universe.  

We are terrified of not knowing yet Our greatest inventions were not predicted or planned. In field after field from airplanes to computers new innovations Emerged. Even Bill Gates when he wrote his Road Ahead in 1994 failed to mention the internet. The founders of Google and Yahoo were not searching for search engines. Instagram began as a gaming app. Slack as a gaming company. And the founders of Twitter were trying to develop a way to help people find Podcasts.

We are terrified of Not Knowing yet Use typically precedes Said another way in most cases of invention we have only figured out Why after we accomplished the How through trial and error.

The fracking revolution for example which has brought the cost of fossil fuel down remarkably was brought about by trial and error in a Texas field to reduce the cost of forcing oil out of shale. Yet much of what we have been taught about history and innovation would make us think otherwise – the myth of lone inventor etc. and flash of insight etc.. But innovation generally follows a path of a long and murky prehistory followed by a rapid period of synchronous invention followed by falling costs, diffusion and maturation. Each step happening in a link in which it is difficult and misleading to point to any one person as the creator. Said yet another way, we often think Theory or Science leads Technology. Sometimes it does as in the development of the atomic bomb. But more often practice of technology leads science. As Trader Nasim Taleb puts it, theorists come along afterward practicing what Taleb calls, “lecturing birds on how to fly”. This is especially encouraging as we think about the Nike Challenge: how do we evolve as fast as technology and the world around us? We may have to do it faster and at new scales but it is reassuring to know that we have rarely been out in front of our technology at any time in history.

We confuse "knowing" as "having something"

Under the materialistic, reductionist spell we have lived under for the past few centuries, we have come to confuse Knowing with Having Something and have forgotten that not all Knowing is Propositional. In fact, Deeper Knowing is not a thing at all. It is a process or an approach as in Participatory knowing, , Perspectival Knowing from which we can create Procedural Knowing so that others might access this knowing (and propositional knowing).

Some scientists have suggested Knowledge is an exo-species artifact we make the same way Bees make Honey, we make Knowledge and that if an alien species came along they could in fact discover our Knowledge (and the final product of Knowledge could be defined as the set of propositional statements about the Universe that have been proven true (so far).

Don't Objectify the World

Experiencing Reality is necessarily an interpretive and thus Creative act (again there is no sensing independent of purpose). There may be an Objective world out there but you will never experience it. It helps to remember that the Objective perspective is the one perspective you will never find in an ecosystem. It doesn’t exist.

Remember, all perspectives are partial. None are wrong. 

For one thing the definition of a problem* rests on many many assumptions – not least among them from whose perspective* are we defining it as a problem?

For example, let’s take wealth inequality – we see the impact inequality has on the poor but we are less likely to see it Deleterious Effects on the Wealthy. The effect can be so debilitating that insightful leaders like Warren Buffet eschew giving it to their children and less insightful ones like Donald Trump manufacture Failspawn. 

At Panarchy, we are reluctant to characterize anything as a problem. It is wise to be Reluctant or careful with the notion of “problem” because what we resist persists. Any system that exists to fight something becomes dependent on the thing it resists because it is built around it or in reaction to it.  Examples:

• The first oxygen breathing cells were designed to process this poison.
• The one-child enforcement arm of the Chinese government became dependent upon people continuing to have more than one child for its existence and for its ability to collect bribes to “look the other way” when some families had two.