Ask the ignorant
THE PRINCIPLE
People who don’t know what they don’t know sometimes know more than the people who know only what they know
When you know a lot about a topic, you may automatically block ideas that don’t fit into the accepted rules about that field.
That’s why so many breakthroughs in a particular discipline come from people who approach it from a different angle. It’s also why Walt Disney’s Imagineering Blue Sky programme hires young interns to spend the summer coming up with new ideas for attractions for the Disney theme parks.
Stanford University engineering professor Robert I. Sutton described it to the Los Angeles Times as bringing together ‘people who know too much and people who know too little’.
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