Do you know what you don't know?

Strategic leaders question their biases about what they may not know.

THINK ON IT: Do you know what you don’t know?

As leaders of our businesses, we make a million decisions every day. 

And there's the problem: nearly all of those decisions will be made with information on hand — or in our heads, as the case may be. 

After all, who knows better than us about our business, our market, or our customers? And so we habitually make the next decision based on an accumulated track record of not stopping to ask if we even know what we need to know in order to make the decision. 

As experienced as we may be about our market, our customers, and our business operations, as humans we still carry cognitive biases that keep us from making even better decisions for our business. Here are three:

• Confirmation bias. We subconsciously notice and give more weight to information that supports a view we already hold.

• Recency bias. We are more likely to give more weight to the latest information we receive rather than the most persistent or valuable information.

• Anchoring bias. We estimate future outcomes based on what we know today, without giving consideration to other factors.  

Each of these can keep us from asking, "Do I know what I don't know?" Failing to ask that question often enough will leave us flying by the seat of our pants — the exact opposite of what a strategic CEO strives to be.

Take a moment, even now, to ask yourself, "What area in my business do I need to discover what I don't know about it?"

“Fooling around with alternating current (AC) is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever." — Thomas Edison

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