Sometimes, the people who know the least are the ones who see the most. I was reminded of that recently in Drama, Greece, a small paragliding paradise that still flies under the radar for most people. One day while we were out flying, I was reminded of something important: knowledge can also become a limitation. The more we learn, the more often we start believing that we already know.
How New Perspectives Emerge Without Established Truths
Recently, a French pilot showed up at takeoff. Nobody had seen him before, and the first thing we noticed was that he wasn’t using any instruments. No variometer, no GPS, no altimeter. Just his paraglider, harness, and intuition.
Yet he flew routes that no local pilot had thought possible. He flew into areas and landed in places where others had simply shaken their heads and said, “You can’t fly there.” At least not land there, take off again, and certainly not fly back from there during this season.
But he did it because he had never learned that it was impossible. He arrived with a fresh perspective, one that wasn’t shaped by habits, assumptions, or previous experience. Where the rest of us saw risk zones and danger areas, he saw opportunities.
How Experience and Knowledge Can Create Tunnel Vision in the Workplace
The same thing happens far too often in working life. We hire people who “have done it before” and assume that guarantees quality, but experience can also create tunnel vision. We know how things are supposed to be done and stop seeing how they could be done differently.
Often, the people without the answers are the ones who find the best solutions.
The ones who ask questions instead of quoting the manual.
The ones who dare to do what nobody has told them they cannot do.
Knowledge should be a tool, not a filter. Yet many people allow experience to shape their perspective so strongly that curiosity disappears.
While experience protects us from mistakes, it can also limit our ability to see new possibilities.
Sometimes, it is precisely the people who don’t know how something is supposed to be done who figure out how it actually can be done.
Why the Ability to Learn May Matter More Than Formal Qualifications
What could you discover, in your work, your life, or within yourself, if you stopped believing that you already knew how things should be done?
I call it being limited by education. I do not mean that education itself is wrong, but that it can sometimes narrow our view of what counts as competence. We see this often in companies searching for “highly educated employees” while overlooking people who, despite lacking formal qualifications, could actually perform the job even better.
Ironically, it is often people with extensive formal education who are tasked with deciding who is “qualified”, as if knowledge automatically gives us the ability to recognize wisdom. Experience, intuition, and curiosity often end up at the bottom of the list, while formal qualifications receive all the weight.
One of my best pieces of advice for companies is to hire a good mix of people, different genders, ages, and backgrounds. Some with formal education, some self-taught, and some with experience. Innovation happens in the combination.
And then there is the paradox: The same organizations asking for people who “think outside the box” often ask you to prove it through a test designed specifically for people who thrive inside the box. That says a lot about how we measure the ability to think differently:
We ask for originality, but evaluate it through standardized methods.
Perhaps it is time to focus more on the ability to learn than on what people have already learned. In a world that is changing faster than ever before, the ability to learn is becoming the new competence.
Also read: See the Patterns and Use Them. An article about how experience from one area can provide insights into a completely different one.
