#014: Perfect Ignorance
Knowledge is a good thing. We prefer knowing to not knowing. Being ignorant of something isn’t regarded as a good thing. And yet: striving to know everything there is about about a topic can lead to analysis paralysis. It can give you the excuse not to start, since you don’t know enough. But to do something new, it helps being new. Or, as the saying goes: „People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.“ Ignorance got a bad rap.
Similarity, our lives are governed by top-down hierarchies. At the top, decisions are made, at the bottom, they are executed. While the knowledge of being the decision authority might be soothing to CEOs, it also creates a bottleneck for everyone else in the organization. Even worse, it creates a liability: people closer to the issue are usually at lower levels, but have more specific knowledge about it, and are better suited to come up with solutions. Take, for example, Basecamp's Noah Lorang, who does whatever he wants at work and hasn't been fired yet. The key here is that Basecamps leadership provides clear guidance of where they want to go, and then trust their employees to work toward that goal using their specific skills.
This also works for organizations where you‘d expect it the least: as Capt. David Marquet details in his book Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Building Leaders by Breaking the Rules. He tells the story of how he turned one of the worst-performing submarines in the U.S. Navy into one of the best by employing what he calls „Intent-based leadership“. His role as the captain is not to tell everyone how to do their jobs, it’s to provide them with a clear mission goal to accomplish, and then let them work towards it.
Doing this requires trusting your subordinates, of course. And that’s probably why most companies won’t ever try it.