# The Joy of Not Knowing - Synthesis B By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2025-11-03 Every organization claims to value learning, yet most are structured as anxiety machines designed to punish not knowing. The question isn't whether to rebel against this, but whether rebellion through silence and questions can survive contact with quarterly reviews and promotion committees. I've found it requires a different kind of courage than leading with answers ever did. The courage to watch someone struggle without intervening. The courage to say "I don't know, what do you think?" when everyone expects decisiveness. Most unsettling of all: the courage to mean it, to genuinely not know rather than perform ignorance as a teaching technique. Because here's what I've discovered - when I truly don't know and sit with my team in that uncertainty, I see them completely. Not their resume or their role, but who they actually are. How do they think when there's no right answer to perform toward? Whether they lean on experience or reach for new frameworks. Who gets energized by ambiguity, and who needs to create structure before they can move. Their maturity reveals itself not in how they answer, but in how they sit with not having answers. Some immediately fill silence with half-formed thoughts. Others wait, comfortable with the gap. I see patterns from their history surface. The engineer who approaches every problem mechanically because that's what worked in manufacturing. The consultant who can't stop trying to facilitate rather than participate. I watch people surprise themselves, reaching past their perceived limitations because no one told them where the boundaries were. This terrifies organizations. Not the outcome, they'll happily claim credit for innovative solutions, but the visibility. Because if not knowing reveals who people truly are, then all our tidy role descriptions and competency matrices are exposed as fiction. The institution needs people to be fungible, measurable, and containable. Genuine not knowing makes people irreducibly themselves. So organizations don't acknowledge this. They keep measuring decisiveness, keep rewarding certainty, keep building systems that treat learning as something to expedite rather than inhabit. And those of us who've tasted the joy of genuine not knowing, who've seen our teams become fully human in moments of shared confusion, must choose: perform for the metrics or protect both the joy and the truth of who people actually are. I choose the latter. Not every time (I have a mortgage), but hopefully often enough that my performance reviews remain perpetually perplexing to those writing them. #### Related Items [[Learning]] [[Organization]] [[Solidarity]] [[Individuals]] [[Knowledge]] [[Performance]]