THE POWER OF SAYING I DO NOT KNOW

Knowl­edge is pow­er, as the old cliché goes.

For any­one who has worked in high-tech, it shouldn’t come as a big sur­prise when I assert that mas­ter­ing cer­tain tech­nolo­gies can mean a pay raise or more respon­si­bil­i­ties. Employ­ees that “don’t keep up” or who don’t appear to pos­sess the lat­est tech­ni­cal knowl­edge may not be con­sid­ered seri­ous or ambitious.

Most peo­ple work­ing in IT tend to be men. In my opin­ion, most men in high-tech pride them­selves on their tech­ni­cal prowess and are reluc­tant to admit that they don’t know all the answers. I have attend­ed many meet­ings in which you have two or more strong-willed guys argu­ing about some tech­ni­cal detail. Tem­pers inevitably flare and posi­tions become entrenched.

Inc. mag­a­zine recent­ly pub­lished a short arti­cle called the “The Pow­er of Say­ing ‘I Don’t Know.’” Here’s an excerpt: “In today’s ultra com­pet­i­tive work envi­ron­ment, many peo­ple feel the need to be ‘super work­ers’ and have an answer to every ques­tion. But, it’s not always a good thing if you have peo­ple who work for you that are afraid to admit they don’t know something…”

In con­trast to many IT work­ers, I believe that many tech­ni­cal writ­ers and instruc­tion­al design­ers are will­ing to admit gaps in knowl­edge. After all, our jobs require us to research often basic infor­ma­tion for new users. With that in mind, we have to ask sub­ject mat­ter experts some pret­ty rudi­men­ta­ry yet spe­cial­ized ques­tions because we need to relay that con­tent to users. Our jobs require a healthy dose of humility.

Of course, I’m mak­ing gen­er­al obser­va­tions. But I’d haz­ard a guess that a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of IT work­ers want to feel like they know all the answers. For writ­ers, this will­ing­ness to admit we are not “all know­ing” may be one dif­fer­en­tia­tor from our peers.