Requisite incomprehension

Towards the Dynamic Art of Partial Comprehension (Part #7)

Requisite incomprehension for learning and innovation: Encouragement of lifelong learning requires a creative engagement with incomprehension -- building on knowledge at hand, irrespective of whether others elsewhere have access to far greater and more appropriate knowledge. Efforts to acquire or inculcate perfect comprehension prior to action, inhibit both action and innovation.

Adjusting to a degree of incomprehension implies an accommodation with making mistakes vital to learning. In introducing a discussion of learning from mistakes, Jonah Lehrer (Why Do Some People Learn Faster? Wired, 4 October 2011) remarks:

The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as "a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." Bohr's quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn't magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.

As argued by Donald N. Michael (On Learning to Plan and Planning to Learn, 1973):

More bluntly, future-responsive societal learning makes it necessary for individuals and organizations to embrace error. It is the only way to ensure a shared self-consciousness about limited theory to the nature of social dynamics, about limited data for testing theory, and hence about our limited ability to control our situation well enough to be successful more often than not. ("On the requirement to embrace error")

A classic poetic expression of that insight is that of John Keats, (Negative Capability, 1817): Capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Such perspectives suggest that a characteristic of the knowledge-learning society of the future may well be the multiples instances of people "re-discovering the wheel", and perhaps the special theory of relativity -- but for themselves.

Requisite incomprehension in relationships: Whilst a strong case is frequently made for mutual "comprehension" in any partnership relationship, the above argument stresses the complementary need for "incomprehension". This avoids the need for "comprehensive" knowledge of the other which may well be experienced as unnecessarily invasive and indicative of insecurity. Not knowing gives the other space and allows for the possibility of surprise -- itself possibly vital to sustaining the magic of the relationship.

Requisite incomprehension in dialogue: As in the case of partnership relationships, fruitful dialogue may depend on sustaining a degree of mutual incomprehension -- avoiding the fretful need for comprehensive knowledge of each other. This is especially the case amongst a group of individuals with complementary styles and insights (Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, The Wisdom of Teams: creating the high-performance organization, 1992; The Discipline of Teams, 2001).