On admitting what you don't know

It’s Friday evening and I’m sitting in a nearby McDonald’s. It was only a few weeks ago that I realised that once nearby coffee shops close, it’s the best place to sit and potter, which is saying something. Most of the time, it’s rather calm and quiet and makes for a decent spot to write if you can see past the overal vibe of the place. Today, though, it’s rather crowded, and I’m only here because there really is no other option.

I managed to get in a few hours of focused work over the course of the week, which feels like a good sign. I do find the work on the method evaluation tool interesting, but it’s also frustrating. At its core, it has revealed to me the difficulty of working with people whose work I don’t respect: when they have different opinions, instead of being thrilled and seeing it as an opportunity to learn, I’m faced with what I think are stupid and self-evidently wrongheaded ideas. I find it genuinely frustrating and a waste of time. It is a good opportunity to practice being an effective advocate of my own ideas, and communicating them in a way that convinces others that they are superior. I try to focus on that, but – more often than not – I’m reminded of Steve Job’s point about the importance of working with A players, feeling that I’m stuck with mostly B and C players. (For now, I’m not gonna talk about the validity of taking such a perspective, as the whole point is to get things out of my system.)

Over the course of a couple meetings with my new boss this week, it also became clear that her technical understanding of our work is very limited. That’s fine, as it’s not her job to know all of this. But what I do find difficult is that she makes decisions without a prior effort to truly understand the issues involved. It feels to me like she feels like she has to be decisive and in charge, which, ultimately, is right, but lacks the self-confidence to ask for help in first understanding the issues involved. Listening to Bob Iger describe some of his early bosses at ABC news is a stark contrast to this, and highlights the shortcoming even more clearly. Iger describes his bosses as being down-to-earth and decent and honest, and as having the habit of fully acknowledging things they didn’t know and asking junior people for advise and explanations during meetings. This is what you want. It’s certainly something I want to remember if I’m ever in that position.

At the same time, that experience has also highlighted, once again, how valuable my understanding could be in a more senior position. Because the ability to think both strategically at a high level and scientifically at a very low level is rare. I don’t think I’m world class in either of them, I certainly am not a world-class scientist. But I do think that I’m at least in the top 10 or 20 percent of people in both of them which, it seems, is rare.