Knowing or Learning?

“I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions.”

― Lou Holtz – football coach, commentator

We’ve recently been enjoying a visit by our three year old grandson. The insatiable curiosity and interest in learning about everything around him. His repeated “Why?” and “How does this work?” questions have made me think about where I’d fall these days on a spectrum of Knowing versus Learning.

Knowing <---------------------------------------------------> Learning

At one end of the spectrum is the Knowing Mindset. It appears when we stop asking questions. A tell tail sign is when we’re continually defending our position in conversations with others even though we have only a fraction of the pertinent information. As we get older it’s very easy to become trapped in a comfort zone of things we believe to be true. We no longer live with wonder about the world around us. We no longer challenge whether our beliefs are valid. Instead we reflexively know the answers to everything we consider important.

As a business owner it’s incredibly easy to fall into the quicksand of the Knowing Mindset. You run your business day after day needing to make constant decisions. Your employees and customers look to you for answers. Slowly and insidiously you unconsciously begin to believe you have to have all the answers. At its worst you always have an answer for why trying something new won’t work, then wonder why no one comes to you with ideas anymore. Your future ends up being a product of only what ‘you’ know. Your decisions are based solely on what’s worked for you in the past.

If you look at the root cause of why many businesses fail you don’t need to be Sherlock Holms to uncover the Knowing Mindset as a key contributor. “It’s just the way we do things around here.” and “We’ve always done it that way.” are things you’ll hear in businesses run with a Knowing Mindset.

Every business talks about wanting to find a competitive advantage yet often reflexively dismisses new ideas from employees. If they ask for customer feedback at all, the Knowing Mindset organization typically explains away the feedback as; “We just hear from the difficult customers.” or can explain why any ideas they have just won’t work.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Learning Mindset. This is the area where curiosity reigns supreme. It means being open to contrary ideas and beliefs. Companies in the Learning Mindset ask way more questions rather than just dictating what to do. The Learning Mindset is a growth mindset.

Being in the Learning Mindset means you accept that the world will always be more complex than you can ever be. It means you realize what you know is often the biggest hindrance keeping you from what you need to know. As the leader of your business being in the Learning Mindset means you understand you can never know everything. With that knowledge you not only ask more questions, you become good at asking the right questions. Questions that allow you to create solutions to problems that wouldn’t have happened if you’d have stay mired in a Knowing Mindset. Solutions your competition is always looking to copy, but typically too late because you’ve already moved on to better ways of doing things.

If you think about the differences at both ends of the spectrum it’s clear to see why leaders of companies with a Learning Mindset typically dominate their industries. Competent organizations consistently ask better questions. They’re not afraid to try new ideas. They quickly throw out ideas that don’t work yet retain the knowledge they’ve gained from trying it. They’re not afraid to challenge processes that worked in the past that have seen time pass them by.

It’s hard to come up with valid solutions when you’re blind to the fact you’re a big part of the problem. Companies with the Knowing Mindset live here a lot. Constantly blaming the economy, ungrateful customers, poor employee morale, incompetent sales people etc, etc, etc.

As the leader of your organization do you pursue what you ‘need’ to know or are you hung-up making decisions based only on your current knowledge base? The best leaders I’ve ever met or read about realize the biggest obstacle they face on their journey is a personal one.

What you need to know will always outpace what you already know. Find a way to tackle that insight and watch what happens to you as a leader and to your organization!