'Thoroughly Concise Ignorance'

We usually think of ignorance as a negative word. But I heard a speaker at a conference recently who got me rethinking how we should approach the concept.

In many of the instances where we say we "know" something, we're actually talking about a fairly surface-level understanding; there are usually entire levels that remain unexplored. We often hear people say, "You don't know what you don't know," but I think that in most cases, with a little determined examination you can find out.

That's what this speaker was getting at. He was talking about the importance of what he called "thoroughly concise ignorance." This is the ability to quickly and accurately identify and summarize what we don't know in any given situation and use that to our advantage. It's about being smart about ignorance.

In this sense, ignorance can be a good or even necessary condition. If you're not aware of where you are ignorant, how can you learn and grow? Instead of trying to deflect or cover up what you don't know, embrace your areas of ignorance for the opportunities they represent.

As educational leaders, we at Spear have built our philosophy around this. For instance, Dr. Frank Spear has often said that every dentist should have at least one case a week that feels beyond the scope of their current confidence level – a case where they say to themselves, "What do I do here?" By accepting the notion of thoroughly concise ignorance, they use these cases to help them identify where they need to grow as a clinician.

Our entire curriculum is organized around this principle of layered learning. Getting to the next layer means being able to see new areas of ignorance, and that in turn takes you to yet another layer. At each layer, you get more confidence about taking on increasingly more complex cases in a comprehensive, interdisciplinary way. And each time you discover a new gap in your knowledge, you have just discovered an enormous opportunity.

Tomorrow's exciting new knowledge is born out of today's ignorance; it's a wonderful fact of human development. But this only works if you have the will to seek out and expose that ignorance so that you can convert it to something more useful.