Sir Stephen Tindall is a very experienced chair. He starts meetings of new groups with a nice Icebreaker. He asks each participant “What do you wish you knew 20 years ago?”The problem is of course we don’t know what we don’t know. Nowhere is that more apparent when someone comes into our lives who does know what we don’t know. And it’s often not until then that we realise that we really didn’t know.This sounds a bit like that ridiculous thing Donald Rumsfeld (Bush’s Defence Secretary) once embarrassed himself with – known unknowns and unknown unknowns.The point is this: chances are we are all lumbering along in a state of innocence/ignorance about how much better our business could be. Sometimes we think that we have people who “know” the business, but have they learned anything new or are they just repeating what they learned in their first year in the job? And sometimes we worry about the knowledge that walks out the door when someone valuable leaves, and it turns out that their replacement operates at another level up – and again we realise what we don’t know.Two points out of this musing:

• Don’t fear losing people with knowledge – it may be opening a door to a new level of knowledge
• Stop valuing knowledge and start valuing learning. Especially in yourself. Remember that the enemy of learning is knowing.