So returning to the street light analogy, we find that our initial knowledge (the white bit) is probably not really all that white. There's a difference between your assumption of your knowledge and an actual knowledge of the extent and boundaries of what you know. This also includes knowing what you know a little bit and stuff you don't know at all.
The problem is if you don't have a growth mindset (to continually learning and challenging all aspects of what you assume is your knowledge) then the circle of light is merely an illusion. You assume you know THIS much when in reality you know much less - the circle of light is full of dark spots.
This was the trap of ego for me early in my career - I actually thought I knew way more than I did. A few years of AB testing sent me crazy - seeing that my hopes for designs were continually wrong. Moderating in a usability lab for two years (watching my designs fail) just made me angry until I figured it out. Some things I could look after in terms of the design and research but predicting the future, this is not a skill I have.
So not learning humility, per se, but the ability to know what I actually know, and that the other stuff really I don't know. That meant when it came to making decisions, I know could be more confident in saying "I don't know, but I know how we can find out precisely".
The more I have learned, the greater the amount I have discovered that I don't actually know. That powers me on to keep learning. Knowledge deteriorates as soon as you receive it in a way, so you must keep a continual flow into your life. Not only to learn what you don't really know but also to understand how practice and others have improved that knowledge, even in a short space of time.
If you assume that your knowledge is out-of-date, that you're missing something horribly important, that you need to know about ML, algorithms and statistical modelling (for example) then that's the right kind of FOMO you need. It's a FOMO on a future where you know the stuff you don't know!.
In terms of personal impacts for individuals? In people I teach and work with it either manifests in extreme confidence to do something, whilst making the wrong assumptions about how easy or hard that could be, or what may be involved. An overconfidence like "Flying a plane? Can't be that hard" or "Running some drug trials? Me and my mum could sort that" ;-)
But the biggest way way it manifests itself is in fear. Fear of doing anything that isn't safe. Fear of innovation. Fear of experiments or changes going wrong. Paralysis of organisation and individual work. Fear of being seen as stupid. Fear of it being your fault. If you are fearful that your knowledge is limited and shrinking, wish to hold onto it without sharing with others, use it in a way to achieve your ends without a wider goal being reached, these are all signs of an atrophy mindset. If you have difficulty being proved wrong, you are in the wrong industry.
The truth is that unless you are continually challenging what's in your circle of knowledge, you'll never get to find out whether you are good or not, you'll never know how solid your knowledge really is and you'll not be able to decide easily whether you (or someone else) should be doing a task or project. Thats a pretty key leadership skill you learn with experimentation along the way - you rely upon using the best method of research or asking the right person, in order to get the highest quality answer.
To have doubt, to surrender to the higher power of research, experimentation and being wrong - is to overcome this trap of ego. I see organisations paralysed by "We've always done it that way" and "I know our customers" and "We have 20 years in marketing" and "That's not on brand" or "We don't like that".
Boss skills - the mid and senior level executives - are most in need of remedial action to understand their rumsfeldian spaces. The wonderful thing is that it's scientifically proven now - taking risky bets on trying innovative experiments gets a higher return, so avoiding risk and being safe will hobble your work.
It's the same way with knowledge - if I'm always consuming stuff slightly scared that I'm getting out of date, then it will never happen. If I assume I know my stuff, I'll be out of date in less than a year!
Oh and one last thing - not all novices display overconfidence. Sometimes the bravado is from prior experience where it worked, sometimes from something read in a book, sometimes an experiment that worked on another website. They have yet to have the shit kicked out of their stuff. They have yet to learn that despite all their hopes, they are not a proxy for the users at scale. This is part of the learning, where you understand that despite your emotional investment, not everything will work out the way you want it to. It's a bigger life lesson too haha!
This is where running user research and experiments knocks all that c**p out of you. After a few years of testing and doing research, I was really depressed that I couldn't predict the future. I thought I was really good at this work. I’d read so many books. I thought I was clever so why did lots of my stuff fail, sometimes in counter-intuitive ways? Well, I actually WAS good at the work but just not at predicting outcomes ;-)
I finally figured out that it's not my responsibility to be make everything work - it's to learn from every experiment and piece of input that I can, which will then shape and show us HOW to make it work. If you want to improve something, you need to know exactly what it wrong with it and where.
There’s another benefit to this growth mindset — If you are always trying to expand that circle of knowledge (it might get irregular in shape over time) then you also learn who is standing at other lights around you. You then know not only what you know, but what other people know and the stuff that they know way better than you. That knowledge and awareness of the weakness and limitations of what I know, coupled with raw curiousity, is what makes me want to explore that rumsfeldian space.
