Knowing Things

Nobody likes a know-it-all. 

Or do they? 

In our industry, know-it-alls are sometimes called Planners. They’re often introduced as the “clever people”. And sadly, some of them actually believe this. For anxious, self-doubting people, this is the sort of validation they need to justify all the books on their bookcases. Books where only the first twenty pages matter. 

But they don’t know everything. Nobody does. And isn’t that the exciting bit? 

The extent of anyone’s knowledge is derived from their experiences, and for most people in this industry, those experiences are narrow or selective. Having your ego stroked for being clever doesn’t somehow entitle you to see yourself as the arbiter of all truth. It’s just what people say to sell you to clients. So don’t let it go to your head.  

In fact, the really clever people don’t think they know very much at all. 

Plato recounted Socrates as saying, “I know that I know nothing.” Admitting your ignorance to a subject is empowering. It relinquishes you of the mantle of being the arbiter of truth. It forces you to second guess everything. All the received wisdom. All the assumptions. And it also empowers others around you to voice their own views. 

We are all equal in ignorance. 

Richard Feynman was another clever person who didn’t claim to know things. He barely bothered to learn the names of the things he was working on.  I suppose that makes sense when you’re messing around with the unfathomable chaos of quantum mechanics. But it also seems appropriate when dealing with entirely subjectives matters like creativity, or how to write a proposition.

In reality, you don’t know what is right. Nobody does. You don’t know what will work and you can not guarantee success. 

You can hypothesise. You can make best guesses. Anyone who tells you they know they know something to be hundred percent true, has likely fallen victim to their own hubris. 

In science, the language used is deliberately more conservative. They say things like “there is overwhelming evidence to support X”. But there is always a chance it won’t work the way we think it will. There will be exceptions to the rule. There will be anomalies.

In the creative industry, we are more drawn to confidence than evidence. We like confidence. Confidence sells. Who cares about evidence anyway? That usually requires charts and diagrams and long presentations. And we don’t like presentations. They’re dull and take away from the work. And the work is the only thing that matters. Whatever it is. 

We much prefer to listen to the people who sound like they know what they’re talking about. Regardless of whether or not they actually do.

This is where I would normally talk about the Dunning Kruger effect. 

That’s the idea that people with a little knowledge on a subject often assume they know more than they do. The more you know, the less likely you are to be sure. Until eventually you know enough to know your limitations. Or the limitations of thinking everything is simple. 

Someone suggested that with Planners, this can relate to their use of the phrase “it depends”. The more they know, the more things will depend on other things. 

Unfortunately, if any of them read this, and don’t know what they are talking about, they’ll try to trick you with “it depends”, and you’ll be none the wiser. Not very dependable, the planners. 

However, it’s been pointed out to me recently that we are apparently using Dunning Kruger all wrong. We are using it as a weapon, and apparently it’s not a weapon. It’s a graph. But we don’t like graphs, because they’re evidence, and evidence is boring. But this all begs the question, what part of the Dunning Kruger, Dunning Kruger curve are you on? 

It’s not really a graph. I just said that to annoy you. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

Knowing things is a messy business.

It’s also stressful. But stress is apparently good at helping you figure things out. It’s good to be anxious, because crippling anxiety, apart from keeping you up all night, also helps make better ads. And we like ads. 

Anxiety motivates you to question things. 

I mean, if you’re not in perpetual existential crisis, terrified of being found out, terrified you don’t know enough, or the things you think you know are wrong, are you even a Planner? Probably not. 

I wrote recently about why we should ask more stupid questions. I rather like stupid questions. Stupid questions help people test whether what people think they know is right. It also helps other people around you know the same things that you know. 

The problem is, we expect people to know the things we know. In fact, we get annoyed when they don’t. Shouldn’t they know this already?

It’s almost as if they’re entirely different people. 

We aren’t happy when they do find out the things we know either.

People are constantly unearthing the same insights that others have already unearthed. But we don’t like that. Someone else already figured it out. You’re just late to the party. It doesn’t matter that your observations arrived at the same apparent genius of this person who wrote a book. You didn’t write a book about it, so you’re a charlatan. 

Books are good. Books are better than your observations. We like books because we can say we’ve read them, and people who have read a lot of books know a lot of things. 

Perhaps it isn’t the revelation itself that we revere, it’s our own knowledge of it. We see ourselves as intellectual gatekeepers. We keep our little secrets. Like Gollum caressing the ring of power, we hold onto our Byron Sharp passages, or whatever Mark Ritson wrote in Marketing Week in 1934. If everyone knew the things we knew, then we wouldn’t have jobs. And how would we afford all our books then? What a terrible life that would be.

So it seems the insights themselves are apparently irrelevant. We derive more value from our ownership over them. How utterly toxic. 

But isn’t this the culture of planning? 

We expect everyone to know the things we already know, but we ridicule them for being excited when they do. 

The Welsh rock God, Kelly Jones wrote, “it’s the not knowing that kills you.” Is it any wonder none of us can sleep at night?