Rookie Smarts: Who’s got ‘em?

“While truth may be eternal, knowledge is fleeting.”  This is the assertion from one of my favorite authors, Liz Wiseman, in her book Rookie Smarts.

In my coaching and consulting practice, I frequently talk about truth this way:  I believe in Truth (what I call “capital T” Truth) and that I reserve that for God; but that I also believe in “lower case t” truth: what’s simply true about people, teams and organizations.  I do think there are certain things that are just true and transcend contexts of organizational size, industry, filing status, etc.  I find that my job is often facilitating how a given truth shows itself in a given context and how we can best learn and apply that truth most effectively.

Having said all that, I hold that together with the need for growth, for paying attention to new thought or maybe just the latest expressions of something we consider timeless, and certainly the new information and learning that continues to emerge at an increasingly rapid pace.

Wiseman continues her thought this way:  “[…knowledge is fleeting], not because we forget but because the pace of discovery quickens.  What we learned yesterday may be obsolete today.”   She cites a study that in 2005 showed “decay” of knowledge of 15% per year.  That was 16 years ago!  If we’re riding an exponential with technology (and we are) and the pace of change continues to quicken (and it is), what is our rate of knowledge decay in 2021?  It’s a pretty scary proposition.  Unless…

My Wiseman fan club membership started with her earlier work, Multipliers, and it’s where I signed up for this idea of how to harness the collective intelligence; that the access to what other people know is what counts.  This idea of Rookie Smarts simply adds to it that “our ability to learn is more important than what we know.”

So the question(s) for all of us become: 

·      What posture for growth are we assuming?

·      To whom and to what are we paying attention?

·      To how much collective intelligence do we have access?  And are we tapping it?

We all have any number of limiters into what are capable of on our own.  We are, after all, finite creatures.  Yet, we also have choices in how we approach these questions and it’s in these that will have the greatest impact on our trajectory and that of the organizations we lead. 

Choose well.