One of the great things about being a journalist is you can admit ignorance.

Well, maybe not ignorance, but it is OK to not know things. You can ask questions without feeling dumb.

In fact, people expect it of you and make allowances – although constant questioning may explain why surveys show journalists are unpopular.

What’s so great about admitting ignorance?

Our society is often intolerant of people not knowing things.

Consequently too many adults are reluctant to admit to knowledge gaps. We often feel the need to disguise our ignorance. And that’s bad.

Needing to disguise ignorance is a particular problem for knowledge workers. Employers hire us for our expertise and insight. They may feel cheated when told: “I don’t know” or “I’ll find out”.

Yet no-one can know everything – even in a narrow subject area.

Admitting you don’t know is liberating. Being able to ask questions is liberating.

Asking people to explain what they mean when they say something strange or incomprehensible is liberating.

On the other hand, pretending to understand when you don’t is stifling. And it’s hard to learn new information when you are busy trying to hide your ignorance.

I make a point of asking questions even when I suspect I know the answer. It’s the best way of learning new knowledge, even if it makes me sound like an inquisitive child.

And I never worry about appearing ignorant.

My former colleague Divina Paredes wrote Fail now, succeed later for the New Zealand edition of CIO magazine. It’s only short, but it’s well worth reading. Paredes quotes Gartner vice-president Steve Prentice as saying by encouraging and rewarding business process failures, companies can put themselves on the fast track to optimal solutions.

Prentice looks at failure from a geeky, tech management perspective. That’s understandable given his job and the CIO magazine audience. But the principal works just as well on an individual basis – although not necessarily in the same way.

By taking chances and failing, we can learn better ways to do things in the future. That’s why managers. In fact everyone. Should be tolerant of individual failure. While there are some people who are serial failures, most of us learn from mistakes. Some people are perfect or live charmed lives, the rest of us tend to stumble towards success taking three steps forward and two steps back.

CIO > Fail now, succeed later.

Three knowledge worker blog posts with interesting (or alarming) perspectives:

How to Measure Knowledge Worker Productivity

Jon Miller from the Lean Manufacturing Blog suspects knowledge workers might be more productive if they laugh more often. There’s almost certainly something in this. I recently sat through a seminar in Auckland run by someone promoting much the same message (her name escapes me).

Are Intellectual Knowledge workers eventually prone to Alzheimer’s?

I suspect the best way to read this story from the Smart Economy blog is to view it as a wake up call. It basically says knowledge work makes you fat (the post uses the word obese, but let’s forget the euphemisms) and at the same time there’s a link between obesity (which sounds better in this sentence than ‘fatness’) and neuro-degeneration.

To Learn Lists – What My Grandfather Taught Me

Developing To Learn Lists sounds like a great idea to me. It’s not that new a concept, the Design of Knowledge’s author Bill Brantley  got it from Benjamin Franklin via his own grandfather. Basically, write down a list of things you want to know, then go and study them. Like the ideas it’s extremely simple. (To Learn Lists have been all over the Internet in recent weeks, this post has the ring of authenticity even if it isn’t the original source.)