The Power of Not Knowing

At some point in my life I was introduced to the idea that there are four corners of knowledge, or something to that effect. And the corners are labeled “Things You Know”, “Things You Don’t Know”, “Things You Know You Don’t Know”, and finally “Things You Don’t Know That You Don’t Know”. Gradually I have begun to understand the power in not knowing. To be more specific, the power in knowing that you do not know something.

I bring this up because I am becoming increasing frustrated by those around me who do not understand that there may be things they do not know. That is not the same as saying they believe to know everything. What I am trying to explain is that they simply do not have the ability to open their minds and even try to see things from a different perspective. To be blunt, they lack even a trace amount of empathy for a fellow human being.

I can understand that we all get frustrated from time to time with things. But that is never an excuse to treat anyone poorly.

As a DBA, we are often asked to jump in and start investigating an issue immediately. Very often we get little to no details to work with other than “the system is slow”. Other times we are asked to do impossible things by self-proclaimed certified experts such as “please increase the page size of this database and let me know when you are done”. No matter what the scenario, in order to do our jobs we must ask questions. Simple questions to start with, such as “can you give me the name of the server and/or database”, or “can you tell me the exact query you were trying to run”.

See, we know that we don’t know everything, so we need to find some additional details. Even if someone passes along an error message, we may still ask some very basic questions, to be certain that we understand everything that is happening. It has been my experience that error messages are not always very informative, they may not paint the whole picture, and can quite often be misleading (i.e., they could be the end result of a different issue altogether).

What I am finding is that my more difficult customers are the ones that cannot understand why you would ask any questions at all. As a result they jump to illogical conclusions akin to “this person does not know what they are doing”, and send back very unprofessional responses to very legitimate questions. This does nothing short of raise the frustration level for everyone involved. Are these people heading to airports and when asked “did you pack your bags yourself” do they respond with “do you see anyone with me?”

So, the question I now have is: Is the power in knowing, or knowing that you don’t know?

Who has more power? The person that knows everything, or the person that understands that no one person can know everything, and that perhaps there are some additional details that need to be uncovered before taking any steps forward?

Personally, I believe the true power is in having the maturity to understand that no one person has all the answers, all the time, as well as the empathy to understand why someone may be asking them questions. But that is just me, and I know there is a good chance that I have no idea what I am talking about. But I am okay with that, because there are lots of things I don’t know, and this is just one of them.