Issue 6.1 / February 5, 2004

Contents:

• Embracing Your Ignorance <read>
• HyperLinks: We Built This City <read>
• Top Ten Things W Might Say if he Ran Your Company <read>
• MRT NewsBriefs <read>
• Calendar of Events <read>

Embracing Your Ignorance

You probably think you're a smart person, well educated, informed and aware about life and the world. You are wrong. Even the smartest, best educated, most highly experienced person in the world, whomever that may be, must recognize the scale of their ignorance. There's no denying you know a lot, we all do, but there are two truisms at play: 1) even at full capacity, what you know is vastly overshadowed by what you don't know; and 2) ignorance is the true dominant logic of our world.

Take a look at the decisions you make every day. Now think about the amount of ignorance that went into them, the amount of risk you take on them, as well as the trust you put into the information you base them on. If you have been honest with yourself, likely you have noticed that the amount of uncertainty and guesswork you have embedded in these decisions is much greater than its opposite. Let's say you decide to go on the Atkins Diet--do you really understand the combinatory nutritional effect of proteins and carbohydrates on your body or just "kind of" get it? Even with the most educated guess, ignorance is the dominant logic of our world and always has been.

For many, this is hard to accept. Nearly everyone has felt the pride of making a really good, well educated choice, such as when you buy your first new car or home, or when you avoid eating burritos because you know they give you gas. Also, ignorant decisions aren't necessarily damaging and often work out just fine. Many who go on the Atkins Diet get the desired result, however, that does not mean they fully understood what they decided. "Percent ignorance content" in life is always very high, it is a virtual constant, but it's often invisible or ignored.

What does this have to do with business? Well, everything. Every decision you make in product development has a potentially damaging ignorance content. It may be that your mechanical engineer doesn't understand that the product makes its profit from software and not hardware. Or it may be that a marketing person doesn't know that making the assembly out of translucent colored plastic will violate FCC standards for radiation emission. The damaging part isn't that these people are ignorant, it's that you can't blame them for it. Nobody can know everything and life throws enough curves at you that the rules constantly change. However, each of the above decisions could cost the company significant dollars, perhaps millions.

If you can't blame people for their ignorance, then how do you deal with it? Really, the only way is to acknowledge its existence and try to stay aware of it at all times. When someone pushes back on a decision, and you don't know why, instead of assuming the other person's ignorance, consider your own first. In the example above, when the marketer has the colored plastic requirement rejected, instead of challenging the engineer for flatly saying no, a deeper discussion needs to be had on the various tradeoffs of satisfying this particular requirement. What often happens instead is someone gets their feelings hurt and their skills disrespected because there's no communication and another manager is usually called in to mediate. Ignorance wins.

It's key to be comfortable with your own ignorance. Understand that you can't know it all and stop trying to or pretending that you do. Understand that other people are ignorant too, and help educate them when you can rather than resenting their shortfall. On the same track, don't resent someone who's trying to teach you something either, swallow your pride and better yourself for it.

Lastly, avoid ignorance's partner in crime, 'assumption.' Assumptions are the tool of ignorance. For example, people tend to assume that others make more money than they really do. When you see a business that appears successful, you often think, "they must be raking it in," and then you wonder why their prices are high or why they used a cheaper plastic for one part. More often than not, you have grossly overestimated someone else's profitability because of what you don't know. You don't know their labor costs, their insurance premiums, their rental and leasing rates, their marketing expenses, their salaries, their material costs, their licensing fees, and the list goes on ad nauseum (this is highly evident is pro sports, traded players and salary caps). If you are in business, I guarantee you encountered someone who wrongly assumed what your business is like.

Recognize ignorance for what it is, and don't vilify it unnecessarily. Ignorance is not stupidity, it is a fact of life that affects everything and everybody. While it gets a negative reputation, it is actually benign, and like firearms, is only damaging in how it is wielded, not by existence alone.

HyperLinks: We Built This City

Link: http://www.citycreator.com/

A friend sent me this link on my birthday and I thought it was very cool and that engineers and non-techies alike would appreciate it. Basically, City Creator is just as the name implies, a simple, fun building tool where you can take small little icons of architectural parts and create an entire city out of your imagination. The end results can be quite impressive, the graphics are very well designed and cute, and the process is easier than making things with legos (it's a totally drag and drop adventure). Created by Denise "Pip" Wilson and Cal Henderson, the site is completely free (no ads on the site either). Why? Denise and Cal said it's because they love you (really, they said this, it's in their faq). How can you argue with that?

Top Ten Things George W. Bush Would Say If He Ran Your Company (Rerun originally published TCP 3.6)
From the MRT surveillance satellite over Alexandria, VA

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