The Power of Not Knowing | Liz Wiseman | 2016

Read and download the full address from the BYU Speeches website: https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/liz-wi...

Sections:
Introduction - 0:49
Multiplier Leadership - 3:14
Accidental Diminishers - 9:33
Rookie Smarts - 13:19
Challenge Brings Satisfaction - 21:58
The Trap of Knowledge - 28:58
1. Ask More Questions - 29:04
2. Admit What You Don't Know - 31:53
3. We Can Throw Away Our Notes - 34:16
4. Learn to See the Genius in Others - 35:24
Conclusion - 38:21

Liz Wiseman was president of the Wiseman Group when she presented this BYU forum address on 26 January 2016.

© 2016 Liz Wiseman. All rights reserved.

"I want to turn to the second question: As professionals, how does our knowledge get in our own way?

I want to go back in time again, back to Oracle when I was the age of many of you here. I was just a year out of graduate school and a year or maybe a year and a half into my career when I was asked to manage the training function for the company. That seemed premature to me, but then the new responsibility was really premature when they said, “And Larry also wants a university, so, Liz, we need you to build the team and go build Oracle University.”

It struck me that this was a grown-up job, and I wasn’t yet a grown-up at all. In fact, my only qualification to run a university was that I had recently been at a university. However, no one else seemed at all concerned with my great lack of experience.

Having this big job with very little experience, I was forced to ask a lot of questions and stay close to the executives. My strategy was to keep showing up at their staff meetings and to learn as quickly as I could. What I learned was that once you keep showing up with questions, they expect you to have answers at some point. It is like showing up to a potluck and never bringing anything. At some point people say, “Hey, are you going to actually bring and contribute anything?”

So I was forced to show progress and results. We were doing a pretty good job, but I took a lot of teasing from the executives about being kind of young for a fairly big job. One particular time my boss and I were at a business event, and he introduced me to a client who was a very distinguished-looking man. My boss said, “This is Liz. She runs Oracle University.”

The man noticeably flinched. It was almost like a startled response, and my boss, Bob, thought it was quite fun, so he jumped into the conversation, coming to my aid by saying, “Oh yeah, Liz? She is not particularly qualified for her job.”

And then he broke out in this big smile, and I realized that it was like the first lesson in executive management: you don’t get a lot of air cover. So I had to defend myself, and I said, “Hey, Bob, who wants a job they are qualified for? There would be nothing to learn.”

And it was as if he had said, “Wish granted,” because for the next dozen years I had jobs that I had no idea how to do. It kept up for about a dozen years, but eventually I started to feel qualified. I actually started to feel legit, and I began to think, “Gee, I think I actually know how to do this, and maybe someone would actually hire me to do this and start a university or run a university.”

That is when I started to feel stagnant and stuck. And I decided to leave Oracle—honestly, in search of something I didn’t know how to do, which kept things wide open.

That is what led me to be a management researcher and author. When I left Oracle, I had this really wonderful Hindu friend named Dinesh, and he said to me, “Liz, what is the question that you are holding this year?”

And my first reaction was, “Wow, a year seems like a really long time to hold a question.” But then I realized that I actually did have a question, and my question was this: How does what I know get in the way of what I don’t know but maybe need to learn?

This was a very relevant question for me because I was leaving a comfortable environment in which I was the boss, and I was moving into unfamiliar territory in which I would be an underdog, at best.

But it struck me as also a relevant question for our time because we live and work in a reality in which technology has allowed our business cycles and living cycles to spin so fast that often we don’t even face the same problem twice. And the state of the art doesn’t stand still or stay true for very long.

For example, for those who work in science or technology or who are going to take a job in a field related to or highly infused with STEM, I did some interesting calculations for my research. Based on the rate at which knowledge is increasing and the rate at which knowledge is decaying, I calculated that about 15 percent of what we know today is likely to be relevant in five years.

Okay, and that is not the number fifty—that is the number fifteen, as in between 10 and 20 percent. And here is the kicker: we don’t even know which 15 percent this is."
Liz Wiseman