The wisdom of Not Knowing | Steven D'Souza | TEDxClapham

imagine that the person you are secretly in love with gives you a birthday gift here is what they say but I want you to wait three days until your birthday to open it so you don't sleep with it that night or the next and you wonder if that is a profession of knowledge of love or is it something more mundane, you notice that it is not sealed and you can open and close it again, no one would know, so could you just raise your hand if you sneak away? look at what's in the box and then close it again just raise your hand great we'll come back to the box towards the end of the talk.

I wouldn't take you back to when I was in primary school and I had gotten to the end of the school Christmas quiz and I was there with another girl called Caroline and I was six and we were at the front of the whole school assembly and the teacher made a question, the question was what animal the meat comes from. and if I answered this question correctly I would win the quiz so I stood on the stage and froze I didn't know the answer and I waited I wasn't I wasn't smart enough to say Could you please repeat the question?

Then time ran out and the teacher turned to Caroline and asked her what animal the meat comes from and she confidently answered: the cow and everyone applauded and I hung my head in shame and got off the stage and from that moment on I was addicted. . to knowledge and for me knowledge was a way to avoid the vulnerability and shame that I felt as a child when I was wrong about something or didn't know the answer and we live in a society in which knowledge really has a price, it is valued as bacon, said knowledge is power and it really is very important.

I am not underestimating the importance that advances in knowledge in technology help us live longer and have made us progress in almost all fields of human endeavor, but what I want to present in this short talk is the On the other hand, also , that knowledge can be dangerous and it can be dangerous when we give power to experts. Friedrich Hayek, when he accepted the Nobel Prize in Economics, called his winner's speech the pretense of knowledge and warned against formulating policies based on the omniscience of economic theory Norina is wounded, she has written a book called Eyes Wide Open, how to make smart decisions in a confusing world, says we need to democratize knowledge and we need to take experts off their pedestal and brain scans reveal that when people listen to Experts talk about the independent part of their brain that makes decision-making responsible decisions literally close Nicholas Taleb, who wrote the book The Black Swan, was more direct and said that it is not a good idea to take a prognosis from someone who wears a tie often our The experts are wrong: the Institute of Medicine estimates that They waste between seventeen and twenty-nine billion dollars a year on inaccurate and unnecessary patient care due to misdiagnoses and perhaps one in 20 hospital deaths, so the consequences are dramatic.

One of the problems is the problem of overconfidence, not trust but too much trust, an example of this is the global financial crisis of 2008. In November, the Queen went to visit the London School of Economics and was in front of students, academics and regulators and asked if you are all so smart, how come no one predicted the credit crisis would come? So the British Academy decided to answer your question and on June 17, 2009 they convened a panel of government regulatory experts and academics to answer your impertinent question and on the 26th. In July they published an embargo letter that said that in reality the crisis It was not unexpected.

There were many warnings that the crisis was coming. The problem was not a lack of knowledge. In fact, one global bank that is now largely in government hands had 4,000 risk managers around the world. the problem was the competence in the experience of a few and the blind confidence that they understood what they were doing. Alan Greenspan later wrote that he couldn't find a great example of eh Burris mixed with overconfidence, literally, we must keep in mind that We are much more limited even cognitively than we think, take, for example, people who we think have abilities very strong cognitive abilities.

Chess grandmasters in 2013, there were 1,441 in the world and chess grandmasters can only think about 15 moves ahead, so go figure. in a game with fixed and consistent rules that is all they can think of compared to markets in the world we live in where there are millions of actors making moves that are predictable and unpredictable, rational and irrational, it is impossible for anyone to may know Daniel Kahneman who recently wrote a book called think fast think slow says there are over 150 unconscious biases primacy bias you remember what you hear first recency bias or last confirmation bias when you remember what supports you will already think it comes to say if you think you have reasons for your beliefs you are probably wrong, but still, given all that, we don't know the three most powerful words we are afraid to say, whether in business, in politics or if you are in any leadership or position.

It's, I don't know, that's with the CEO of a company and he said, Stephen, I'm meeting with my senior team the next day and I'm not really sure what we're going to plan for the next five years, but I can't. tell them I don't know because if I tell them this they will immediately disavow me I will lose all my credibility so what I want to do is present in this short talk the idea of ​​reframing I don't know as something negative we use the metaphor of being in the dark for something positive because saying no I know it helps us avoid overconfidence, arrogance and arrogance and allows us to take responsibility, night and day are half, but we privilege the light and if you think about it, all growth or change happens in the invisible, it happens in darkness, whether it's the seed in the ground or the baby in the womb, so just when you think nothing is happening, that could be the biggest possibility of change in our lives beyond what was said. the darkness illuminates not

knowing

is not the same as not

knowing

information if I want information I could go to a search engine so it is very different from that it is not when the problems are simple either this is an image of a train bathroom door don't ask I wonder why I took a photo above the trailer door, but this is an example of something that is very simple.

Here the example of something a little more complicated is whether the door is locked or not. It's a little more complicated, but the challenges we face today. Our lives are not only simple and not only complicated, they are chaotic and complex and it is not easy to apply the same type of response that we would give to that type of problem, so let's look at an example. at an intersection in Addis Ababa and noticed pedestrians crossing the street, so they were navigating and making decisions and told him what is happening around them so often when we are on the edge of what we know, we come to a place that The term that I used the metaphor of Finisterre was Finisterre, if you have ever done the Camino de Santiago, it is on the edge of Spain and it literally means and that at the end of the earth and in medieval times they thought that this was literally, the end of the land because the people who sailed might not have returned, so on ancient maps they would draw dragons or lions in the waters because it was that scary, so when we reach the edge of what we know and enter the great unknown that we are facing in our own lives and we can feel it because it feels vulnerable, it feels different and we can feel it in our bodies that were reaching this edge place and these are some of the typical reactions that appear when people reach the edge, so in the top corner you can see some of the reactions it's a rush to control asserting more control over what you have can be passivity in self-defeat nothing worth doing that we're not going to be successful here maybe there's paralysis from the analysis you do in Excel you make a list of tasks you get consultants but when you analyze it the problem has changed another problem it is catastrophic to think no, everything will go wrong I can't quit my job I can't start a business.

I can't do this because you're thinking about the worst case scenario. Another reaction is the rush to act. Let me do something quick instead of sitting in the unknown a little longer. And the last one is. resistance you can feel that through procrastination or it can be feelings or thoughts I'm not good enough I can't do this so some form of resistance what I want to propose is that when you are at the limit it is not the same as entering the unknown no is the same as uncertainty uncertainty is just a feeling in response to the unknown if you think about children who are at Christmas or on their birthdays, they don't feel insecure about the gifts they will receive, they are excited and curious, so The proposal here is that we don't need to worry about the gap, actually the gap is a place of opportunities, without knowing, it is this face between the known and the unknown, and there are people who thrive in that space, whether they are entrepreneurs, artists, adventurers, explorers.

Along with my co-author Deanna, we interviewed these people to find out what they did to confront the unknown, not as a place of uncertainty but as a real place of opportunity in their lives, and what we discovered is that it's not about learning new things. It's not about adding another tool to your kit, it's actually about unlearning and we use the phrase of his poet John Keats, he talks about negative capabilities, that is, making space, he wrote a letter to his brothers George and Thomas on the 21st December 1817 and describes negative ability as the ability to be a mystery of uncertainty and doubt without becoming irritated by searching for facts and reasons, so I would like to share with you four quick negative abilities that you can practice to make space to look at the unknown as a place for opportunities. the first is empty your cup I trained as a psychotherapist and one of my clients had severe depression for seven years and I was with him and I thought I needed to know everything about depression so I could help him treat him and my supervisor came to me. and said Steven, what makes you think that you need to be an expert to be able to help this particular individual?

What are your other ways of doing it? And he said that Phrase Tamizh from Suzuki and Rashi is this, in the mind of the beginner there are many possibilities in the experts Keep in mind that there are few and that gave me more confidence to try something different. Its aikido founder reportedly died at age 80. His name was morihei ueshiba and he asked to be buried with a white belt and that is significant because, although he was a master, even though he knew what his art was, he still considered himself a beginner. What can I learn here?

How can I see things from scratch and with new eyes? In real world examples, things like microfinance or telephone banking all grew in contexts and cultures where there were no path dependencies for them to flourish because people didn't know or were attached to a traditional way of doing those particular activities. I love this quote when the founder of Grameen Bank says very clearly that not knowing can be a blessing, sometimes when you are open you can do things your way without worrying about rules and procedures, every time I needed a procedure of rules to watch what everyone else does and what conventional banks do, and when he found out what they did, he did it.

On the contrary, conventional banks go to the rich he went to the poor they went to men he went to women they are owned by rich people his Grameen Bank was owned by poor people and he said he could try because he didn't know anything so there is a beauty in freshness and naivety when facing the great unknown in that sense the second principle is from the artist Paul Gauguin he says close your eyes to see I went to something called I look in the dark I don't know if you have been I went to Innsbruck and entered the building in total darkness and someone guided me through this darkness it was if we cross a street a busy road I am a river and only at the end we ate in a restaurant in complete darkness but this person guided me very expertly and when I left the building it was only then that I realized that he was blind and that he had been the one who really had the eyes and that she had the vision to guide me.

Clearly, in what I was totally unable to see, this is a famous image called empathy and the image is notable because the artist Marco Antonio Martínez, the photographer is blind, he did not take the image in the normal way, he used his hands as an aperture, felt his environment was often overly reliant on certain data sources, individual sources of information when we are faced with the unknown, so the idea here is that the eyes are the fascists of the head, how can we make our other senses come into their own? life and, more importantly, hearing? and listen to each other, a study conducted at the University of Rochester said that doctors tend to interrupt after 23 seconds and make a diagnosis and if they only waited six more seconds thepatient would reveal something significant that could have changed the diagnosis, so how can we all listen to each other? a little more than we normally worked before stopping the third principle was jumping into the darkness this is one of my favorite photos it's by the artist Yves Klein and you can see that the person in the photo is smiling and these were the days before Photoshop but he's jumping towards what looks like death on a concrete Parisian street and why is he smiling?

He is smiling because he stated that he knew he was a martial artist. He knew how to fall safely, so the third principle, sometimes when we face the unknown, we must step forward and we must find our way through some form of action. There is a beautiful poem by Paulo Nair, it reaches the edge, he said. They said we are afraid of reaching the limit he said they came he pushed them and they flew my own fear trying something new and taking a step is that I am afraid of heights. I've had it since I was a kid so I decided to give it a try.

For me what would be a challenge and I tried the flying trapeze I don't know if you've ever done it but in Regent's Park although I went on a Saturday with a friend and I was the only one over 12 because the rest All the children and they really played with each other and I was very shy and nervous and we practiced on the lower trapeze that was a few meters from the ground, how to do the movements and the point I intended to climb this ladder. a 40 foot pole and at the top stand on a board and then you would reach.

I was reaching forward and now it was a point as I leaned into the void. I couldn't hold myself up. I needed to let go or tear myself apart. I broke away and let myself go and flew through the air and at the top of the trapeze I put my legs and fell backwards like a whip in the air and what I discovered is that this is when we feel most groundless. that nothing supports us and when we feel that we are most at the height of our uncertainty, that is the exact place when the movement has the greatest possible flexibility, so the dancer does not move much on the floor, but rather makes the movements in the air like the dancer or the gymnast, so when you feel that everything in your life is changing, maybe that is the moment when you have more freedom to try something different, try something new on your face.

A case study is the company in Jewett who made tax software accelerate, they wanted to increase the income of farmers in rural India by just 10%, but instead of having an answer to this problem, they came up with 13 experiments or different hypotheses by texting market prices to their mobile phones to test whether the market honors farmers' prices and they achieved through these experiments there is a way to find a way to increase farmers' income in a 20%, which makes the difference between sending a child to school or not, so how can we experiment? How could we try something new?

It begins when all other solutions may fail and the last principle is to delight in the unknown, it can be a beautiful place where we can have new newness and freshness, so coming back to the present secret of the person you love your secret, could you open it now . and I could discover something like socks or I could wait a little longer and just see what's in this box and I have a clue of the myths, there is a myth of psyche and eros, they were lovers and they were separated and psyche could be related to eros if he passed the tests that the goddess Aphrodite gave him, then he went through these various tests and the last test was getting the perfume box from the goddess Persephone, the queen of the underworld, the first captures, no one entered the underworld and came back, It's a pretty big catch, so he managed to pay the boatman, crossed the river Styx into the underworld, overcame the dogs and entered the underworld and met Persephone and said to her: Persephone, please can you give me your perfume box?

Persephone gave him her books under one condition, do you know what that condition was? The condition was not to open the box, so she had the books and returned, she passed the first tests, the hungry dogs she was about to ascend and meet them. her lover and what did she do she opened the box and the middle said she fell unconscious which is a euphemism for where did she die now why did she do what was in the box so what people think was in the box was knowledge of mortality and that's what kept Persephone being so young, so the value of this story or the point of the stories, the gods envied our ability to not know that they were omnia sin, they knew everything, but the fact that we didn't Let's know it means that every day can be fresh, every day can.

Be new in every moment, too full of possibilities and that is something they could never have, so when you face the unknown or the most known in your life, I leave you with my favorite quote, it is from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, He says that traveler does not exist. path the path is made by walking so I wish you a great path to follow and thank you very much