Happy August {{first_name|friend}}!
Consider these two pithy quotes:
If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.
And:
I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.
I love these two quotes next to each other as beacons of what makes human intelligence really human.
The first quote is a long-time favorite of knowledge management consultants, and it feels as true as ever. There is a “distributed tacit knowledge” that teams create, a form of intelligence vital to the business yet extremely hard to pin down.
The second one I just heard last week, mentioned by Jimmy Iovine as he reminisced with Rick Rubin about their early days as music producers:
Rubin: “I remember I played you a song [when we first met] and you said ‘I wish I could still make something that simple.’”
Iovine: “When you get to a certain point producing albums, you stop making the first album…even if you are making their first album you are producing it like it’s their third. You’re missing the innocence and the ignorance…You enter the studio and it’s someone’s first album and you just have too much information. You’re not all in the same place. I wish I could just…stop.”
This resonated for me. As I work on starting new businesses now I often feel like I just know too much. When I started OpenTent I didn’t know anything about business or consulting…I just treated it like a sandbox and learned and messed around. All those accumulated learnings are useful in starting something new, but they also suppress the “innocence and ignorance” that are critical to launching something truly new and bold.
It seems possible that we are entering an Intelligence Age in which Lew Platt’s wish might actually come true. We will in fact be able to bring together all the knowledge: structured and unstructured, shared and individual, how we make each decision and how we take each action. Distributed knowledge becomes less of a challenge - yet at the same time it becomes less of an advantage. We will harvest the full knowledge of the organization - and then what? Once harvested it can be copied, stolen, even abandoned.
Collecting the organization’s knowledge is a technical challenge that seems likely to be solved soon enough. The adaptive challenge is harder, more valuable, and more interesting: choosing not to know.
Walking into the studio ready to forget just enough to make a true first album.
For those of us who help organizations do their best work, these quotes point us to two ways we can be useful.
First we can help our clients fully live in their knowing, enabling them to finally organize and analyze their information the way only computers can.
And then we can help them fully live in their forgetting, setting that knowledge aside long enough to dream up something fresh and surprising.
The way only humans can.
Builder’s Briefing will take a summer break for a couple weeks! See you later this month… 😎