The Leadership Advantage of Not Knowing

What Richard Feynman can teach us about curiosity, challenging our assumptions, and becoming better thinkers

There’s an uncomfortable expectation that comes with leadership: you’re supposed to know.

Know what? Everything: the answer, the strategy, what happens next, and even the name of Aaron from HR’s oldest child. People walk into your office all day with problems, looking to you for solutions. When the market changes, you’re expected to explain it; when your team reaches a crossroads, you’re expected to lead the way.

Experience often reinforces this expectation of certainty. The longer we lead, the more patterns we recognize. We know our business, our customers, and our people.

Except…sometimes we don’t.

And I’m increasingly convinced that being willing to admit uncertainty and challenge what we think we know is one of the most valuable habits a leader can develop.

I was reminded of this while reading about Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist famous not only for his intellect, but for his relentless curiosity and unconventional approach to thinking.

In 1974, Feynman delivered a commencement address at Caltech titled “Cargo Cult Science." At its heart was a deceptively simple warning: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

That line has been knocking around in my head. Because you don’t have to be a physicist to fool yourself.

The stories we tell ourselves

In business, we often make assumptions about our value, our customers, and our markets that eventually become accepted as fact. These include beliefs like:

• Our customers won't pay for that.

• Our people don't want more responsibility.

• We've tried that before.

• This is just how our industry works.

• The competition could never do what we do.

While some of these may be true, how can we be certain?

Feynman’s address was about scientific integrity, which he described as a kind of “utter honesty.” If you have a theory, he argued, you have an obligation to look not only for the evidence supporting it, but for the facts that disagree with it. You should actively surface the things that might demonstrate that you’re wrong. 

That is remarkably relevant to leadership.

At WhiteWater, we talk about Thinking–Action–Outcomes, or TAO. The premise is simple: our thinking shapes our actions, and our actions produce our outcomes.

The tricky part is that we’re often not conscious of the thinking that underlies what we do.

We carry around assumptions, beliefs, and mental models accumulated over years. Some are enormously useful, while others may have been true once but are no longer relevant.

If we never examine these underlying beliefs, we might spend significant energy changing our actions while leaving the foundational thinking that created the problem untouched.

Leadership can make this harder

There’s another wrinkle here.

As leaders become more senior, it can actually become harder to challenge their own thinking.

I sometimes call it "boss fog." People laugh a little harder at your jokes and nod at your ideas. They may become less inclined to tell you when something doesn't make sense.

Success itself can reinforce the problem. If your instincts have served you well for twenty years, why wouldn't you trust them now?

Feynman gives a wonderful example of this tendency in his commencement address. He describes the history of attempts to measure the charge of an electron. After an early measurement by Robert Millikan turned out to be slightly off, subsequent measurements crept slowly toward the correct value rather than reaching it immediately.

Why? Feynman suggested that when scientists got results far from Millikan’s accepted number, they looked hard for reasons to discard them. When their results were closer to what everyone already believed, they didn't scrutinize them quite so aggressively. 

In other words, we often interrogate evidence that contradicts us more aggressively than evidence that confirms us. Does that sound familiar?

Curiosity is an antidote

This is where curiosity becomes such an important leadership capability.

To me, curiosity is a disciplined exploration. Curious leaders don't assume they have the answer; instead, they ask, listen, test, and search for the truth.

And curiosity gives us something else: permission to admit what we don't know and the courage to go find out. 

That doesn't mean abandoning expertise or experience. It means holding our conclusions loosely enough that new evidence can change them.

Here are three simple ways I think leaders can practice that.

1. Make your assumptions visible. When facing an important decision, ask: What are we assuming to be true? What evidence supports or contradicts it? Get that thinking out of your head and onto the table where others can challenge it.

2. Actively seek the disconfirming view. Don't just ask why a plan will work; ask why it might fail. Find the person closest to the problem, be it the customer who left or the employee willing to tell you what you may not want to hear.

3. Change one word. Instead of asking, What should we do?, ask, What could we do?

"Should" pushes us toward an immediate answer, while "could" opens up possibilities. What haven't we considered? What would someone outside our industry try? What if an accepted constraint isn't actually a constraint? It’s a small shift, but it can create remarkably different conversations.

Get interested in being wrong

Feynman wasn't advocating indecision in the face of unknowability, and neither am I.

Leaders still have to make calls, often with incomplete information. We must draw on experience and judgment, choose a direction, and act.

Decision Making in Uncertainty

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to lead a turnaround on a resort that was in serious financial trouble. In the midst of leading the turnaround, we were constantly making decisions in an environment of ambiguity and uncertainty. At the beginning, the resort’s data systems were unable to provide the kind of analytics we needed to make the best decisions. And our marketing and guest information was nearly non-existent.

We knew that we would be wrong some of the time. However, with the expert thinking from our team, we were probably at least roughly right more often than we would have predicted. We also knew that sitting around waiting for “perfect” information would create bigger issues than making a decision and then responding quickly when we learned we had headed in the wrong direction.

Interestingly, making the “wrong” decision often fueled our curiosity about what information we actually needed to make better, more effective decisions. We ended up asking better questions as we went.

Conviction and curiosity can coexist. This looks like making the best decision available to us today while remaining genuinely interested in the possibility that our thinking is incomplete.

Perhaps that's the leadership habit worth borrowing from Feynman: developing the intellectual honesty to question ourselves and our assumptions. We must ask: What do I think I know that I don't actually know?

Feynman devoted his life to finding answers. But one of the things that made him such an extraordinary thinker was his willingness to question the answers he already had.

For leaders, that's a pretty good place to start.