“No offense, but….”
I can’t help but perk up when a sentence starts that way.
“No offense, but how did a mid-level lawyer at mid-tier company get so much pub for saying something that everyone already knows?”
I’m paraphrasing. But someone recently asked me that question. I couldn’t be offended. I have often wondered the same thing. I’m best known for saying that lawyers aren’t all that proficient with the technology they already have and it would be good if they got better. That’s not exactly Nobel worthy. Yet, I received all sorts of awards and publicity. It is kind of bizarre. And I have a few different theories.
First, it is not true that everyone knows the same things to the same degree. The most ignorant are the most likely to labor under delusions of adequacy. This problem of meta-ignorance—we don’t know what we don’t know—affects the way that legal professionals evaluate themselves. They really have no idea how much effort they are wasting because of bad process and technology utilization. This obliviousness also affects their perception of their colleagues, especially the ones that know slightly more than them. I’ll return to the myth of the digital native in a subsequent post.
Second, it was not so much the saying as the doing. I might have been saying that which everyone already knew, but I was the first in-house counsel (as far as I know) to be so public in my efforts to systematically seek to do something about it. Everyone may complain about inefficient behavior in vague terms, but actually defining, measuring, and improving upon inefficient behavior is rare.
Third, everyone knowing something does not make it common knowledge. Common knowledge has a key element beyond everyone knowing something: everyone has to know that everyone else knows it. To quote Wikipedia:
Common knowledge is a special kind of knowledge for a group of agents. There is common knowledge of p in a group of agents G when all the agents in G know p, they all know that they know p, they all know that they all know that they know p, and so on ad infinitum.
As a recent, excellent piece on the special properties of common knowledge observed:
The moral is that the mere act of saying something publicly can change the world—even if everything you said was already obvious to every last one of your listeners. For it’s possible that, until your announcement, not everyone knew that everyone knew the thing, or knew everyone knew everyone knew it, etc., and that could have prevented them from acting.
I have to remind myself of this in my darker moments. Being on the speaking circuit, you see the same people, in the same places, delivering the same messages year after year. It can be easy to succumb to cynicism. It’s all kabuki theater. After all, one of the best ways to maintain the status quo is to talk about change constantly while doing nothing. Then again:
Further, ours is the speaker’s perspective. The speakers and their messages have limited turnover. But the audience usually consists of first timers. For example, while it may be something they’ve spoken on for years, I left ILTACON finally ready to tackle Agile because of chat with John Grant, as well as thinking deep thoughts about what the Baby Boomers have done to the practice of law because of talk by Joshua Lenon. It would have been a shame for me if either of them had declined to spread their message just because they had shared it before.
Collective conversations like ILTACON and 3 Geeks have many positive effects. The focus is education—creating awareness of new information. But the pursuit of real education—the audience internalizing the message—often compels us to repeat and reinforce information that is already out there. And translating real education into action often turns on that information becoming common knowledge. This first one can make us feel noble. The second can make us feel redundant. The last one can make us feel silly. Re-stating the obvious does not seem like it has much merit. Again:
The moral is that the mere act of saying something publicly can change the world—even if everything you said was already obvious to every last one of your listeners. For it’s possible that, until your announcement, not everyone knew that everyone knew the thing, or knew everyone knew everyone knew it, etc., and that could have prevented them from acting.
In a similar vein, the amazing Seth Godin has some valuable advice for those of us (essentially, all of us) who let embarrassment result in self-censorship:
It’s a tool or a curse, and it comes down to the sentence, “I’d be embarrassed to do that.”
If you’re using it to mean, “I would feel the emotion of embarrassment,” you’re recognizing one of the most powerful forces of our culture, a basic human emotion, the fear of which allows groups to control outliers, and those in power to shame those that aren’t.
The stress that comes from merely anticipating the feeling of embarrassment is enough to cause many people to hold back, to sit quietly, to go along.
And this anticipation rarely leads to much of anything positive.
On the other hand, if you’re saying, “doing that will cause other people to be embarrassed for me, it will change the way they treat me in the future,” then indeed, your cultural awareness is paying off. There’s a reason we don’t wear a clown suit to a funeral–and it’s not precisely because of how it would make us feel to do that. It’s because insensitive, unaware, selfish acts change our ability to work with people in the future.
Most of the time, then, “I would be embarrassed to do that,” doesn’t mean you would actually be embarrassed, it means you would feel embarrassed.
In most settings, the embarrassment people fear isn’t in the actions of others. It’s in our internal narrative. Culture has amplified the lizard brain, and used it to, in too many cases, create a lifetime of negative thinking and self-censorship.
So, yes, by all means, don’t make us feel humiliated for you, don’t push us to avert our eyes. But when you feel the unmistakable feeling of possible embarrassment, get straight about what your amygdala is telling you.
-Seth Godin