{"id":303,"date":"2009-07-15T18:41:13","date_gmt":"2009-07-15T22:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"\/news_blogs\/john\/?p=303"},"modified":"2023-12-21T16:10:56","modified_gmt":"2023-12-21T21:10:56","slug":"do-you-know-what-you-dont-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cccc.org\/news_blogs\/john\/2009\/07\/15\/do-you-know-what-you-dont-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Do You Know What You Don’t Know?"},"content":{"rendered":"
This entry is part 5 of 12 in the series Harvard Business School<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

Life at Harvard<\/strong> continues at an unbelievable pace\u2014but it is great! I’m enjoying every minute of it. Today one of the discussions was about a leader who thought he knew what the answer was, but didn’t know that he didn’t really know what was really going on.\u00a0Hmm, how can you know what you don’t know?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask Questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

You can’t of course, but you can protect yourself by being more curious<\/strong><\/a> than you think you need to be. Ask questions. Here’s a funny example<\/a> of what happens when you assume you know the answer and don’t ask any questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the example, the captain thinks he is confronting another ship. He never asked the other person to identify himself, so there was nothing to challenge the way he saw the problem (which was the problem that his staff had called him to the bridge to solve). It was only when the true identity of the other person came out that the captain had “disconfirming<\/strong>” information. In other words, the new information did not affirm what he “knew” but disconfirmed or challenged it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Good questions<\/strong> to ask all the time, and especially when you think the answer is a no-brainer, include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n