This week, Pete and Jen noodle on the assumption that everyone knows the same things that they know, and how they might work in the reverse of that notion.
Specifically, in this episode Jen and Pete talk about:
- How might leaders run workshops where the knowledge and vocabulary used are built from the ground up?
- In what ways is it brave to ask a question that you assume everyone else knows the answer to?
- How might we all be a little bit more like giraffes?
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Hey Jen, hello Peter, coming at you today with an observation from three separate conversations I've had around assumed knowledge. Well, I shat assume I know what you're talking about, so go ahead and tell me, this is the long and the short of it. Which is a wise thing to do because I gave you absolutely no context whatsoever in that introduction. That was the most vague open I think we've ever had. So assumed knowledge, let me try and explain or share what's happened in all these three meetings that I had in the last week. One of the giant organizations that I am lucky enough to do a bunch of work with has a bunch of leaders strategically looking at how can they leverage generative AI technology to make their way of working their culture even better, even more effective. Like I feel like the obvious thing that everyone is talking about at the moment is large language models, chat, GPT, Google Jam and all of these things. And I'm noticing I'm observing companies, people within companies start to look at how do we use these to make our businesses more efficient, not to replace people. But I love this quote that AI won't replace people necessarily just yet. But people who understand how to use AI will start to replace people who don't. And so the point there being like we need to empower ourselves with knowledge on how to use these tools. So I had three separate conversations with three seven people from with this company, none of who know each other. And they all asked me some version of have you been using these tools? How are you thinking about using these tools? And I just was like, oh, I mean, I use them for this, this and this. I have a few use cases that are really obvious. They sometimes give it a role, like, hey, take on the role of web designer review this website, what feedback do you have or hey, take on the role of executive coach. And here's a particular situation that I might have hypothetically. How would you approach that? Like I like to test it by giving it a role in all three of these conversations. All three of them had some version of like their jaw on the floor to sort of be like, what, you can give it a role and you can ask it to be a web designer or a marketing expert or a customer of this particular company. You can assign it a role and ask it questions. And I was like, yeah, isn't that what everyone's using these things for? And so I'm not out here saying I am uniquely gifted in how I'm using this technology. However, what I am saying is the thing that I take for granted in this one example is the way that I interact with these technologies. And what I'm discovering more and more and more and just reminding myself of more and more and more is we all walking around with this backpack of assumed knowledge, this backpack of skills or approaches to things or uses of technology or ways of performing a song or facilitating a meeting or whatever the hell it is. And we kind of just assume that everyone else is doing some version of the same thing. Yeah. And we've talked about this in various capacities, but it just was like another reminder for me of assume knowledge can really get in the way. And so how do we be aware of that, be mindful of that and start to get around that and all of the things that have to do with assumed knowledge. So that is my context. I've had similar conversations about chat GPT, by the way, that's funny. This is just making me think that as a teacher and a coach, my entire business is built on the moments of assumed knowledge that I have, where I realize it's not knowledge the other person has, right. And basically everything I teach is like a collection of those moments captured, paid attention to, and then built out as curricula. Oh, my brain is melting because I think mine too. Like that's how a great coaching conversation is almost measured or quantified, is did you help them see things they couldn't see previously? Did you provide them with information or a question or knowledge that they didn't know, i.e. that you assume that they did know, but they did not know, or maybe you didn't even assume that they knew it, but they just didn't know it at all. That's so interesting. And so another example where this has come up recently, on this point of like how this feeds into the curriculum that you have as a teacher. I was facilitating this workshop the other day. And so this is me calling myself out because I find this happens a lot. And this is particularly, I'm noticing this a lot since we talked about the pirouette process, which is I often assume in workshops that I'm running that leaders have a grasp of something that I don't even need to talk about it. And I can go to like level four of the pirouette process and for those don't know what we're talking about, we talked about how the pirouette process is your incredible framework for teaching a skill like broken down into the most fundamental rudimentary individual chunks that like the pirouette doesn't just start with a pirouette, it starts with this really, really simple idea. Am I summarizing that effectively? Yes, beautifully. Great. So I often go to like, I've noticed myself with leaders go to stage five, like you already know steps one, two, three and four. And so I'm discovering more and more, or I'm reminding myself more and more that sometimes there are a group of leaders that are at stage five, but so often there's some at stage one or two or three. And so the other day I was running this workshop and I sort of brushed over psychological safety as a phenomenon. And so I was like, okay, you as leaders are building a team. And so we know that psychological safety is really important. So what are the ways that we can build psychological safety? And someone raised their hand and was like, can you explain to us what you mean when you say psychological safety? Oh, wow. Yeah. And I was like, oh, I thought everyone knew what don't you all know about Amy Emmett said in her amazing research and the team at Google who did a bunch of research on what makes high performing teams, high performing. And they were like, we've never heard this story before. So I explained to them, wow. And they were like, oh, we understand that's so cool. So I just I'm like calling myself out in so many different moments right now that I have so much assumed knowledge of other people that is getting in the way of me helping them. Mm. Wow. Wow. Wow. This is making me feel a lot of feelings around what happens every September in New York City when all of these recently graduated newbies come with their shiny BFA in musical theater diplomas to New York City. And then people start talking, biz talk to them. And they're like, what the actual F is anyone talking about? And they're so confused, so confused. But because it is assumed that they would know these things, they don't ask, which then makes them feel foolish. Oh, interesting. Anyway, it's like a vicious cycle. I actually, I'm literally about to in September, run a couple events for the class of 2024 to just help them ask the questions that they feel too embarrassed to ask in other places. Oh, that's so powerful. Like that's a fascinating lens to look at it through, which is what if you're the person who you realize is being assaulted upon has not a word. Like someone is assuming that you already know this thing and like, how do you give yourself confidence, the ability to ask the question so that you can actually get up to speed? Like the person in my workshop just raised their hand and asked, but like there would have been many situations where someone might not ask and you just carry on and then you realize that nothing's landing because they don't even know the concept that you're talking about in the first place. Right. And then the person who raised their hand in your workshop had to take this brave risk and turns out they were speaking for everyone in the room. Right. Everyone's like, Oh God, I'm glad you asked that question, Jen. Right. We're so afraid of looking foolish in front of each other that we're willing to keep ourselves in the dark when the person is standing right in front of us who could just give us the extra little bit of info we need. I mean, this is getting way too meta, but like this is I feel like it's another version of assume knowledge getting in the way, which is if I'm the person in the room with a question, I might assume no one else has this question. Right. And so I'm like, I'm assuming you all know what he's talking about. So I won't bother to ask the question, but what we're saying I think is so often what you think you know or don't know is shared by other people. Yeah. And so it's just a, I don't know, a reminder of that. Like for me, I was like, okay, what's the lesson here? Well, the lesson is in the context that I share these three examples where, you know, generative AI was the topic of conversation for leaders. And each of those three walked away with like a couple of new ideas after we bounced them around for how they might use these technologies to make themselves more effective as leaders. And I thought to myself, if I just assumed that this is how everyone did it and didn't share those and they would miss out on that learning opportunity. So like, you know, I'm reminded of Austin Cleon's book, Show Your Work, or, you know, a Seth Godenism, which is to ship your work or to write a blog and share your ideas. There's something here for me of don't convince yourself to not ask a question or not share an idea because you assume everyone knows that there's so much power in connecting over and bouncing around ideas and questions. I guess this is, you know, why you and I love this opportunity to have a podcast together is because we get to do this all the time and we try to challenge ourselves to not assume that I know what you're going to say about this or you know what I'm going to say about this or that everyone thinks like this. And so just everywhere. I'm assuming this knowledge is everywhere. This reminds me of a prompt I wrote down from a book that I am not in front of my bookshelf right now. So I cannot tell you what book it is from. My bookshelf is about 250 miles away from me. So I'm going to go based on my memory that a great prompt is when you are in a conversation with someone who has more knowledge or different knowledge or insight into a particular topic to ask them, how do you think about that? Oh, interesting. As opposed to what do you think about that? Right. So if I am a leader and I'm talking to you and you say chat GPT, I might say, how do you think about chat GPT? Mm hmm. Because then that sort of like opens up lots of possibilities within the conversation rather than me, the asker assuming that you and I know the same things about chat GPT. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. That's good. This goes to that quote we said in a recent episode that like the biggest mistaking communication is the illusion that it happened. Right. I feel like we're talking about some version of the same thing. Yeah. If I was giving this advice to an actor who is seeking to improve their auditions, if they have a question like, should I be singing this song, a more useful question to ask might be, how do you think about song selection? Mm hmm. Nice. Yeah. So the question behind the question is, it's almost like, can you tell me about your process? Yeah. You know, like because in sharing one's process of thinking about song selection or uses of technology, you're giving other people the opportunity to learn from that process and incorporate some version of that into their own process. Mm hmm. Yeah. Because you think of chat GPT basically as an actor, your chat GPT takes on other roles. Right. That's so cute. And someone else thinks of chat GPT as a recipe box. And someone else thinks of chat GPT as an editor. Right. And so this, I mean, I guess this macro thing that you're articulating, which I think is evident in almost every episode we've ever recorded is empathy, which is like, when we're dealing with anyone, what we know to be true is that they don't know what you know exactly. They haven't had the experiences that you've had exactly. And they don't think of technology in the exact same way that you do. They don't listen to the same series of podcasts or the same books and therefore think the same way or understand a particular topic in the same way that you do. And so when we assume that, we risk misconnection and we risk an opportunity to learn. And so this goes right down to things that we've talked about in this podcast before, which I think bear repeating, which is the thing that you are uniquely gifted at. Like if you were a superhero and you had a particular superpower, what would that be? And there's an exercise called the reflected best self exercise, which I'll put in the box of goodies where people go through this process of realizing what their superpower is. The response is almost always, doesn't everyone think this way or doesn't everyone do this? Doesn't everyone solve problems in this particular way? And the answer is often, no, that's your assumption based on your knowledge of how you're solving problems. And that is also your unique superpower. So you can double down on that and know that and feel good about that. But also be in, if you're in a teaching role or a mental role or a leadership role or a coaching role, how do you help people think about things in the same way or solve problems in the same way that you do? How do you share your process? I love that so much. This is reminding me of two things. One is we recently released an episode called The Thing You Cannot Say. And this feels like the person who raised their hand in your workshop and said, pardon me, what is psychological safety? That was the equivalent of saying the thing you think you cannot say. Oh my God, it's so true. And then the other thing is how do we get ahead of this as leaders, teachers, coaches, parents, et cetera? Recently, I was running this workshop for 40 actors called Sharpen Your Business Smarts. Essentially, at the beginning, I opened by saying when actors talk about business, there's a lot of baggage and there's a lot of fear that everybody knows something that they don't know. And I don't want to look like a fool, so I'm not going to ask questions. I'm about to curse, sorry listeners, cover your children's ears. And I said, fuck that. We are here to learn and grow. So ask every single question you have, even if you believe everyone else in the room knows the answer and as a result of that and also this group is incredibly highly engaged and amazing, they were asking such great questions and the conversation became so juicy. I love it. So I do think like as the leader of a space, you can take the responsibility to just call it out right at the top and say, I'm going to use some phrases. You might not know what they mean. Please ask what they mean. It will help everyone in the room, like step up and be a leader. Raise your hand. For sure. I would go even a step further, which is how do you as the leader in that context incentivize or reward or recognize people for being the person that raises their hand? And so my incredible wife, Tracy, has this brilliant way of doing this that she's incorporated into workshops recently. She leads this team in Australia and a very large company and is a very, very high performing leader. And one of the things she does, this is so it's very Tracy. She has these hundreds of these toy giraffes that are about yay big. I don't know. I would call that like 15 centimeters, which I don't even know what the conversion is to interest. I don't know. Looks like maybe your fingers were an inch and a half, two inches apart. There you go. So these mini giraffes, we've got hundreds of them in our house and she takes them to workshops and says at the top of the meeting and I've actually been in one of these sessions. I went and co-facilitated with her to help her out. And she says to people, I have in front of me a bunch of giraffes, when and if you stick your neck out, i.e. you say the thing you think you cannot say or you ask the question that you don't think you can ask, I'm going to reward you with a giraffe. And what I want to do at the end of this is to tally up who has the most giraffes because the point of this conversation, this doesn't work in all conversations, but the point of this conversation is for us to ask the questions that we don't think we can ask, to say the thing we think they cannot say, to encourage us to not assume we all know what we're talking about. And so I'm going to reward you with a little baby giraffe and somebody, I walked into this meeting that she was facilitating and there's like, everyone's got their little pile of giraffes in front of them. It was so fun. I love that. I love that. And now it is really no wonder that she married you because you are as tall as a giraffe. Stick your neck out, because you go to stick your neck out like a giraffe, right? Wow. Clever. So I guess the real lesson here is ask questions and hold space, which pretty often Pete is what it comes back to with you. So rather than assuming knowledge, create an environment where people can ask questions and you can hold space for them to do so. I think you're right. When in doubt, be like a giraffe. And that is the long and the short of it. [MUSIC] (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
