What You Know?

Is what you know how we ought to value you?  Or - is what you don't know more critical?

Many among us tout an individual's credentials:  degrees, experience and expertise are king.  Yet, at times I have argued that the beginner, the neophyte among us, can sometimes produce more creative, radical and wildly successful concepts and results than our so-called "experts."  The newcomer is not prejudiced by his years of education and "brainwashing."  He can see what others have been taught to reject out of hand.

Some of my friends laughed at me for these beliefs.  But, now it seems that perhaps I wasn't as ridiculous as they thought.....

IT’S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.

Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an interviewer from Fortune, “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.” In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.

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“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field,” she says. “Make it possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”