limited by the known

I’ve come across a lot of fellow software engineers who seem to be really scared to ever admit that they don’t know anything. At different points in time, I’ve been in situations where I’ve failed to understand something that I needed to, or have ended up with colleagues whom I have to rely upon but are having difficulty seeing the point, but don’t want to acknowledge it!

I was in the latter situation recently, and could clearly see that my junior colleague had incomplete as well as incorrect ideas, but was convinced he already knew it and wasn’t open to any other point of view at all. Assuming that one already knows becomes a barrier to learning anything new.

What can also happen in such situations is that they throw around terminology in the hope that the other person feels that they know what they’re talking about. Sometimes I’m reminded of this question that Nipun asks…

What are the design flaws in man-made institutions that encourage fear, competition, and scarcity? Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” How do we address the design flaw so deep into the game?

I’m quite convinced that one good way to address this design flaw is openness among colleagues and project teammates, to acknowledge that they’ve failed to understand something, instead of making a pretense of having understood something! Maybe then the proactive ones can say “…but I’ll find out”.

In this situation however, he was quite tough to convince as he didn’t going to acknowledge his situation. The only way I could get through was through gentle questioning,

Because otherwise the pretense becomes a foundation on which a lot more understanding is based on, and when this foundation is weak, the end result is headed for disaster!

One of the pre-requisites for this kind of openness, is to acknowledge that one dosen’t know something when one dosen’t know it.

J Krishnamurthy’s words are quite relevant…

“If one can really come to that state of saying, “I do not know,” it indicates an extraordinary sense of humility; there is no arrogance of knowledge; there is no self-assertive answer to make an impression. When you can actually say, “I do not know,” which very few are capable of saying, then in that state all fear ceases because all sense of recognition, the search into memory, has come to an end; there is no longer inquiry into the field of the known. Then comes the extraordinary thing. If you have so far followed what I am talking about, not just verbally, but if you are actually experiencing it, you will find that when you can say, “I do not know,” all conditioning has stopped. And what then is the state of the mind?

To answer his question, I’d say the state of mind is one of receptiveness, where one is able to absorb new ideas more easily! 8)