I move between a lot of different rooms.
Boardrooms. Lecture halls. Market stalls. Vendor offices. Conversations with people holding doctorates and conversations with people who left school early and built something anyway.
There is a pattern across all of them that I have stopped being able to unsee. The people who know the most are often the people doing the least. And the people producing the most can usually only explain a small part of what they are doing.
That sounds like an argument against education. It is not. I am writing this between a lecture I am giving and a thesis I am not finished with.
But something is going wrong, and the reason is not that knowledge makes you lazy. It is that knowledge makes you careful. And past a certain point, careful stops being a virtue.
What the chess players showed
There is a study that explains this better than any management theory I have read.
Researchers gave chess players problems that had two solutions. One was familiar but not optimal. The other was better but less obvious. The familiar solution blocked the players from finding the better one. This is called the Einstellung effect, and the finding is brutal. The presence of the familiar, non-optimal solution reduced expert players’ problem solving ability to roughly that of players three standard deviations below them in skill.
Three standard deviations. The expertise did not just fail to help. It temporarily erased itself.
Your knowledge arrives before your thinking does. It hands you an answer that worked before, and the answer is good enough that you stop looking.
There is a broader version of this too. Deep expertise increases the number of options and considerations that surface at every decision point, which is exactly the condition that produces paralysis. You know too much to move quickly and not enough to feel certain, so you keep gathering.
The real mechanism is risk, not laziness
Here is the part I think most people get wrong about this.
The expert who stops doing things is not avoiding effort. They are avoiding exposure.
The more you are known for knowing, the more a visible failure costs. If your reputation sits on being right, being publicly wrong does not just damage one project. It damages the thing your whole professional identity rests on.
So without deciding anything, your work shifts. Toward advising. Toward reviewing. Toward the kinds of contributions that cannot be clearly marked wrong. You become the person who comments on the plan rather than the person who owns the outcome.
Commentary is safe. But it is also weightless.
The person with less to protect can try something, fail, and lose nothing but time. That is not a disadvantage. In a world that moves quickly, it is the whole advantage.
What the research says about speed
A study of 21,000 leadership assessments found that one of the defining behaviours of effective leaders in a crisis was to decide with speed over precision, and to embrace action without punishing mistakes. Missteps will happen. Failing to act is worse.
McKinsey’s work on organisational decision making points the same way. Companies that decide faster also tend to decide better, and they perform better financially. Speed and quality are not opposites. They travel together.
Colin Powell’s rule was to act when you have between 40 and 70 percent of the information you want. Below 40 you are guessing. Above 70 you have already lost the window.
Most experts I know operate at 95 percent and still feel underprepared.
The two kinds of knowledge
This is where the usual framing fails.
The trader in Makola who has run a business through three currency collapses does not know less than the person with the doctorate. She knows an enormous amount.
- Pricing under uncertainty.
- Credit without collateral.
- Which supplier will fail you in the rainy season.
- How to read a customer in four seconds.
None of it is written down, none of it came from a classroom, and none of it can be cited. So we do not count it as knowledge.
It is knowledge. It is just the other kind.
I wrote before about why the people selling on the street are better marketers than most of us. The mechanism is the same thing. They are not smarter. They are closer to the consequence. A bad pitch costs them a sale today, so their understanding updates today. Our bad campaign takes a quarter to show up in a report, filtered through four people, by which point nobody is sure what caused what.
Knowledge about things comes from study and transfers easily. Knowledge of how to do things comes only from doing, and mostly does not transfer at all. The second kind produces results. And no amount of the first substitutes for it.
This is the same divide I wrote about in the code was never the hard part. We named one kind of skill hard because it was difficult to learn. We never checked whether difficult to learn meant difficult to replace.
The drift nobody warns you about
Every step up moves you further from the work and closer to talking about the work. More meetings, more reviews, more decisions about things other people will execute. That is what seniority is.
But nobody tells you about the drift.
One day you have been senior for six years and your last real, hands-in-it contact with the craft was in a different decade. You still have opinions. They are still delivered with authority. They are increasingly based on a version of the work that no longer exists.
I started as a software engineer. There is a gap now between what I remember about building software and what building software actually is. Everyone develops a gap like that. The danger is forgetting it is there.
This is close to what I wrote about in the driver’s seat. Hubris rarely announces itself as arrogance. It arrives as conviction. The belief that you already know enough belongs to the same family of error as the belief that only you can fix it.
The thing that actually fixes it
Researchers studying why some experts stay flexible while others calcify found that humility was the most consistent factor. Experts with low humility became less flexible as their expertise grew. Experts with high humility became more flexible as theirs grew.
Same knowledge. Opposite outcome. The variable was not what they knew. It was their relationship to not knowing.
That is not a soft finding. It is the whole thing.
The question
I am not arguing for less thinking. Thoughtlessness has its own long list of casualties. I am arguing that knowledge has a shelf life, and the only thing that renews it is contact with the real thing.
So here is the question I have started asking myself, and I would offer it to anyone senior enough to feel comfortable. What have I actually done lately? Not supervised. Not reviewed. Not had a strong opinion about. Done.
If the honest answer is nothing, the expertise is already expiring and the confidence has not noticed yet.
The less you know is not the point. Plenty of people know very little and achieve very little.
The point is that knowing was never the finish line. It was the thing you do on the way to attempting something, and the attempt is where the knowledge comes from in the first place.
Everything else is commentary. Including, if I am not careful, this.
