We Don’t Know…

… a phrase that, I admit, I occasionally use when responding to a question from a client regarding the future.  It’s certainly not an admission you want to make too often, especially as the head of research,… but if you really don’t have a credible answer, it’s better than making a guess and getting called out.  And by saying ‘we’ it takes a bit of the sting out of personally acknowledging that ‘I’ have no clue; it groups my function and the company together as the collective ‘we’.  It wasn’t until I attended a couple of conferences these last several weeks that I realized just how common this phrase is.  At first I found this a bit odd, especially when one considers the amount of new information being generated each-and-every second on the World Wide Web.  But then I thought, the way I, the way we, realize what we don’t know is by asking questions about what we do know,… like why, how, where…?  These questions, when answered, prompt even more questions.  Bottom line, we don’t know everything,… and there will always be more that we don’t know than we do know.

The first conference was PopTech!, a great gathering I attend yearly in beautiful, quaint Camden, Maine.  Their agenda is packed full of wonderful presenters and performers, which attracts a crowd from across the globe (though I would guess the majority are from the east coast).  For all they know, so many of these brilliant speakers either directly or indirectly implied there is so much we don’t know.  For example David Harrison, the director of research for Living Tongues Institute, said we know of 7,000 plus languages in the world (many unfortunately going extinct with each passing year),… and yet we don’t know of all those that disappeared before we were able to capture the essence of their culture and the human knowledge it embraced.  Or John Priscu, a renowned polar scientist (and self acclaimed guitar rocker and Harley rider), who has been studying the amazing topography beneath the Antarctic solar cap.  We know there are rivers, lakes, and mountains beneath this 3-mile thick sheet of ice (which is constantly moving); and we know there are numerous micro organisms that don’t exist anywhere else on earth,…but we don’t know the mystery behind how these organisms have thrived totally deprived of sun light (for 20,000 years!).

I also had the privilege of speaking at the Santa Fe Institute Business Network Symposium.  The line-up of speakers was again impressive, each speaking to some aspect of ‘complexity’ which is at the core of the Institute’s ongoing work.  There was one very energetic speaker named Avidan Neumann, a professor and leading expert in the field of viral kinetics.  His subject was titled The Future of Medicine, in which he argued for the importance of tracking one’s biological profile,… early and often.   The professor believes that by the time most illnesses are discovered, such as cancer, the medical treatments are facing an uphill battle to fight off the negative effects of the illness.  If instead the treatments are started early, based on certain known ‘markers’, the results have been proven to be much more successful.  But professor Neumann also stated that as much as we know about how to treat certain conditions,… we don’t know the body’s response and long-term impact of prescribing certain medications before they are known to be needed,… or when mixed with other medications.

So these days, I’m much more comfortable admitting “we don’t know”.  And like others, the more I do learn,… the more questions that arise.  But that’s what makes the pursuit of knowledge and ongoing discovery so exciting.  The path is long and winding, and you can be assured there will always be something more to question and ponder.  This is life,… so beautifully designed.  Do you know…?