Tag / knowledge age

by Nathan Coumbe

Encourage ignorance (and overcome it)

When you are serving other people (i.e., working), there will be times when you don’t have the answer to the problem in front of you.

Perhaps you work in customer service, a retail store, or banking. Someone is going to ask you a question for which you do not have an answer. What do you do?

If you went to a typical school or were processed through typical corporate training, you might have a few possible answers immediately:

  1. Tell the customer you don’t know, you’re sorry, and you can’t help them.
  2. Immediately go to your boss and ask her to give you the answer or take over the situation entirely (unless your boss is a crazy control freak and wants her finger on the pulse of every step you take, she won’t appreciate this).
  3. Try to figure it out yourself by moving through all the formulas, procedures, and company policies with which you were conditioned (definitely not the worst option, but it’s limited in its effectiveness).

Do you see a better option?

The better option

You are surrounded by people that know more than you, have more experience than you, and do the same type of work as you, either in person or resources on the internet. Ask them for help, but take it one step further.

Learn alongside the person you are trying to help. It’s easy and has two benefits: 1) the person in need gets the help he or she requires, and 2) you learn something new that will be in your toolbelt for next time.

Here’s your answer when you don’t know:

“I don’t know the solution to this problem, but I guarantee we can find one. Let’s find out what it is together!“

The flaw in our system

Most of our education and training conditions us to work by ourselves, independently from everyone else, under an authority figure who has all the answers.

“Only raise your hand if you know the answer” becomes “never acknowledge ignorance in front of customers!” That will only discredit you. They will lose faith in you. You will be humiliated.

Actually, no – by being humble enough to admit your ignorance, they will respect you for not lying to them, not giving them bad information that will fail or hurt them in practice, and not wasting their time.

The real world is full of collaboration, synergy, and needs us to use all available resources to find the answers. The real world is an open-book group test.

It is not full of, nor should we encourage, independent work with no outside help, an authority figure with all the answers, or a lack of information that you are not allowed to remedy by looking up the answer.

If the real world isn’t like that, why are we training people to operate that way?

Be bold, be brave, and admit your ignorance. Then go find the answer using every person and resource at your disposal.

“I don’t know – let’s find out together.”

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by Nathan Coumbe

Everything is marketing. Everything is sales.

That’s the premise.

Even on the smallest scale, we are marketing and selling. It might not be products but rather ideas or ways of thinking and being. 

If I have an idea about how people can behave or change to improve their lives, to become the best possible versions of themselves, it does no one any good unless I can persuade them to adopt the ideas. That means that I have to sell to them.

“Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone.”

– Seth Godin, This Is Marketing, p. xiv

Marketing and sales are both about influence; each of us must influence others to create change (we will get into the ethics of influence in another post).

Leadership in the modern age is sales and marketing. During the Industrial Age, a leader told an employee what to do and that person either complied or left. In the Knowledge Age, a leader must influence those who follow. You can still attempt tell people what to do, but it rarely leads to enrollment and willing compliance, without which high-quality work does not occur. However, influencing them – by empathizing and understanding what they want, feel, need, and believe, and then having the courage to let them know your ideas for progress – this sort of leadership brings others willingly to your way of thinking. (It also potentially creates better ideas than either party came up with on their own.)

Every career requires sales and marketing. A psychologist is both a salesperson and a marketer. If they do not market, they do not get patients. She cannot rely on her credentials to bring people into the office.

A teacher is marketing each time she sets foot in the classroom. If she cannot get her students to come with her, if she cannot get them excited and willing to go on the learning journey, her knowledge and expertise are useless. She must influence them.

If you coach people on how to level up their careers, personal lives, or get past negative scripting from earlier life periods, you must sell them on the ideas you present. If you fail to do so, or do it poorly, you have failed to create change or the desire for it in the other person. 

Regardless of whom you seek to influence, you must always begin by understanding them, their points of view, their wants, desires, worries, fears, and problems. That is always the first step to influence, and influence is marketing.

We all must influence others to make change happen, and if everything is marketing and everything is sales, you might as well learn to do it well.

Start with this book here.

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