One of the things school teaches us, is that knowing is a good thing. To teach how much of a good thing it is, school rewards knowing.

Take the teacher asking something and waiting for an answer, take the tests validating what you learned and thus know. Take how we’ve had to learn and present information, may it be the multiplication tables or poems.

It’s also the way many schools determined if someone can graduate. Knowing became the pathway to being seen as fit for moving beyond school into a profession.

Many leaders built their leadership on this idea. They see themselves as having to have an answer to the questions asked by their team. They also see themselves as the ones having to solve blocking issues. Should they fail, their team might not trust them to know how to protect and lead them.

Knowing is perceived as an opportunity to be all-powerful. But not knowing then becomes the point where failure is lurking on the horizon.

The simple reason for this might have been, that it was too complicated to individualize the learning to the different learning styles. And maybe it’s also that the industrial revolution, which shaped schools and made them more widely available, needed professionals who could execute a learned process. And maybe it’s as old as philosophy and the quest to achieve certainty in and through knowing.

What it does, is disconnect knowing from doing. And thus also from learning.