Your ignorance is your superpower.
“Ignorance. Ignorance. Sheer ignorance. You know, there’s no confidence to equal it. It’s only when you know something about a profession, I think, that you’re timid, or careful or … ”
These were the words of an outsider, a 25-year-old man who faced opposition, intimidation, ostracism, and rejection. And, yet remained undeterred.
The man was Orson Welles, and he credited his ignorance—his sheer ignorance—for his magnum opus, RKO 281, renamed Citizen Kane. Welles was the untried director, untested producer, unproven screenplay co-author, as well as the lead actor of the movie. Welles waded right in. He turned the movie set into his school. He taught himself film-making, and studied films by famous directors to understand their technique. He would then pepper his crew with questions on how specific scenes and effects were achieved. With nothing to restrain his imagination and no “wisdom born of experience,” he challenged his experienced cinematographers to experiment as nobody had dared before. They performed the miracles that Welles’ bold creativity called for. Even the film’s credits made a sly reference to the cast’s inexperience, trumpeting that most of the principal actors in Citizen Kane were new to motion pictures.
Today, Citizen Kane is lauded as one of the most influential and innovative movies of all time. Its fledgling director/producer innovated because he didn’t know he couldn’t.
“The word impossible has been deleted from our dictionary and must remain so. Experience is a word to be handled carefully. Experience is a brake on all development. Many people cite experience as an excuse for not trying anything new.”
These were the words of another outsider, a 17-year-old rural farmer driving a milk truck, from which he sold matchbooks, pens, pencils, seeds, Christmas tree decorations, and picture frames to people in remote, forested areas, and in all kinds of weather. That 17-year old created a mail-order catalog so that these people could choose the household items that they wanted delivered. Five years later, he decided to try his hand at delivering furniture. Unable to squeeze a wooden coffee table into his milk truck, he took the legs off the table and flat-packed it for delivery to the customer. Flat-packing meant that he didn’t have to fight expensive shipping fees, or worry about furniture being damaged in transit. The man was Ingvar Kamprad, and he grew his flat-packed-furniture delivery idea into a company that now boasts 460 stores in 62 markets, with Billy bookcases sitting in millions of homes as you read this. The iconic blue-and-yellow IKEA logo has come a long way from the desolate forests of rural Sweden where Kamprad first started selling matchbooks.
Kamprad’s hallmark was frugality. He never borrowed money, and he held IKEA private. He was frugal, for himself, for IKEA, and, above all, for the customer. By delivering flat-packed furniture that could be assembled at home, he made sure that the customer didn’t have to bear the costs of transportation. He was stubborn that IKEA’s mission was to protect the wallets of the masses, the “many people” as he called them. In his manifesto, The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, Kamprad says, “The many people usually have limited financial resources. It is the many people whom we aim to serve. The first rule is to maintain an extremely low level of prices. But they must be low prices with a meaning.”
Radical innovation can happen through outsiders who see the same problem with fresh eyes, unencumbered by experience. Their lack of experience frees them from industry pressure to follow approved practices of doing or accepted ways of thinking. Their lack of experience eliminates assumptions in their minds about what will work and what won’t.
An experienced director or producer didn’t create Citizen Kane.
A 25-year-old first-time director/producer did.
An experienced furniture magnate didn’t create IKEA.
A 22-year-old small-town farmer with a milk truck did.
Unbuckle the Experience Seatbelt.
Experience seatbelts us, and holds us back from flying.
Experience makes us prudent and tentative. It constrains us to seek solutions within the guard-rails of our “wisdom.” It’s protective, but it clips our wings.
I’ll take naive exuberance over experience any day.
Naive experience has not been jaded by failure. Naive exuberance has not yet met impossible. Naive exuberance doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. Naive exuberance dares to go where experience fears to tread.
Experience says, “Don’t.”
Naive exuberance says, “Why not?”
Experience says, “These are the ways.”
Naive exuberance says, “I’ll find my way.”
Experience says, “This won’t work.”
Naive exuberance says, “Why not?”
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki
How do you Innovate through Ignorance?
How do you innovate through ignorance?
- At the start of a project, ask the rookies first. Seek people who are ignorant of the project. Don’t bring in the experts. Don’t bring in the people who know every inch of the guard-rails of possibility, who know what has worked before, or who can recite the textbook of wisdom. Instead, seek the unpolluted, fresh, unconstrained opinions of the Why-notters. Don’t worry about feasible. There will be plenty of time later to bring in the feasible-minded.
- Hire enthusiastic rookies, give them creative autonomy, and watch them change the culture. Rookies are untrammeled by convention, and they haven’t been jaded by disappointed, nor prejudiced by their past. They haven’t yet met brick walls, nor stopped long enough to think about being stopped by brick walls. Rookies smell opportunity when faced with brick walls. The opportunity to leapfrog the walls, dig trenches under them, or bulldoze the bricks to bits. The rookie’s enthusiasm gobbles up negativity, and spits it out for breakfast.
- Question everything. Build a culture around you where people are curious and where they question everything. Everything. Push people to challenge long-held assumptions. Assumptions were often created by people who knew how to solve problems within a specific box, or a set of constraints. If you remove an assumption, you remove the limitation, and you make way for new approaches. All assumptions need to be challenged on a regular basis. The valid assumption of 3 years ago may not stand the test of time today.
- Bring in solutions from other fields. There’s always a parallel in another field, if you ponder a problem long enough. There are clues to every problem from every walk of life. Literally. Swiss engineer, George de Mestral, went on a summer walk in the woods, and saw the tiny hooks of cockle-burs stuck on his pants. Curious how these cockle-burs clung on for dear life, he shoved the them under a microscope. Inspired by what he saw, he created a synthetic version of Nature’s hook-and-loop fastener. He called it Velcro.
When asked how he got away with enormous technical advances, Orson Welles said, “Simply by not knowing that they were impossible.”
Ignorance ignores limits.
And, therein lies its superpower.
