Ik Weet Het Niet

I got my haircut this morning. (In Journalism school at Michigan State I learned the importance of strong leads – first sentences that grab your attention and make you want to keep reading. This is not a strong lead. My favorite lead for a sports story was “Babe Herman has never doubled into a triple play, but he did triple into a double play today, which ought to count for something.” )

I’ve needed a haircut for a month or so. My hair was starting to curl over my ears, and before long I would have had sidelocks like an Orthodox Jew. All I needed was the hat. But I kept putting off getting my hair cut because it was something new that I would have to figure out. (By the way, I am getting my hair cut very short these days, and as I was sitting in the chair this morning I contemplated that over my lifetime my haircut has followed the Three Stooges: I started off as Moe, evolved into Larry, and now am Curly. Nyuk, yuk, yuk.)

“Ik weet het niet” means “I don’t know” and those words come out of my mouth more since we’ve moved than ever before. I didn’t know how to get my hair cut here before this morning. I still don’t know how much I weigh, how tall I am, what my shoe size is, what any of my other sizes are, how to get the cable company to understand what doesn’t work on my TV, and on and on. I just don’t know. I can’t tell you how many calls Gretchen and I have had to make to our Dutch friends that started, “We don’t know how to ….”

I was raised and educated to be the smartest guy in the room. I went to seminary where I studied Greek and Hebrew so that I could read things that no one else could. I have prided myself on being reasonably intelligent for a long time. And my grasp of useless trivia is especially good. I know that Babe Pinelli was the home plate umpire when Don Larsen threw his perfect game in the 1956 World Series, that Hannibal Hamlin from Maine was Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president, and that John Ritter’s father sang the theme song to the movie “High Noon.”

But I live now in a place where none of that matters. What I don’t know is astounding. For beginners, I don't know the native tongue of 99% of the people I regularly encounter. And while I am grieving the loss of my intelligence, I am beginning to see that maybe this new posture of not knowing can be an advantage.

This weekend one of our new staff people asked me a question and I said, “I don’t know” and she said, “that’s what I like about you as our leader,” and I said, “you like the fact that your regional director is clueless?” and she laughed and said, “no, I like that you don’t pretend to know it all and try to control everyone and every situation. You give us the space to figure things out.” I took that as a compliment.

I read a book recently that was about the shift from modern to postmodern thought, and one of the points the author made is that while the modern world was all about intelligence, the postmodern world is all about creativity. Intelligence, he said, is mastery over a body of knowledge. Creativity is the ability to recognize the patterns emerging from an environment and respond appropriately.

Here’s an example. Imagine you are on a train in Europe and the train stops at a station and an announcement comes on in a language you don’t understand. Everyone gets off the train. What would you do? Get off the train, of course. Then what would you do? Follow the crowd, of course. The crowd all walks to a tram stop, gets on a tram, and takes that tram to the next station down the line, where they then get on another train bound for your original destination. This isn’t hypothetical, it happened to Gretchen and me a couple of weeks ago. We actually can understand some Dutch at this point, so when the announcement came on I said, “I think there is a problem with this train” and Gretchen said, “I thought they said something about strawberries.” Is the train broken or are they about to serve strawberries to every passenger? When in doubt, we step back and watch what others do. I have always been taught the opposite – to make things happen on my own, but now I am learning to recognize the patterns and trust the wisdom of others.

Which leaves me pondering many questions today.

The great cathedrals of Europe sit mostly empty on Sunday mornings. They have more visitors during the week from tourists wanting to see the art and architecture than pilgrims searching for God at worship these days. What might we conclude from that? People vote with their feet, the old saying goes, and the people have voted.

Is this a different way to think of creativity for you? I guess I always thought creativity was creation out of nothing, but I see this definition as creation based on what others are doing around you. As I reflect on that, it seems more probable than creation out of nothing.

Is it okay for you to say, “I don’t know”? Is it okay for a leader to say that?

What might it mean to trust the wisdom of others? Throw that into the European context for a moment – are you Americans aware of how this side of the world views you? One way to put it would be to say that Europeans generally don’t think Americans have the ability to trust in any wisdom other than their own.

What patterns do you see emerging around us in the postmodern world?

Here’s to creativity. The words of the now forgotten Five Man Electrical Band seem appropriate:

Signs, signs everywhere a sign
Can’t you read the signs?