Assessing Your Knowledge Orientation

How Deep Is Your Knowledge?

Knowledge knows no limit and keeps on changing and evolving even this very moment. With the spread of the medium to share knowledge and information, like the Internet, the speed of creation and distribution of information and knowledge has accelerated significantly. Facing this rapid change, the first thing you need to do is to broaden the scope of your knowledge.

Broadening your knowledge is like laying the groundwork before building a tower of expertise. For your construction project, you need to flatten the ground to be used as the firm foundation on which to build a high-rise building. With multi-diciplinary knowledge, you can start adding depth to your knowledge base. The depth of knowledge will come as you gain more experience and add a new brick of information to your existing tower of knowledge.

If you are an eager beaver to build this tower of knowledge on your industry or profession, you've got to widen your scope of knowledge in the first place. While you can deepen your knowledge with years of experience, you can broaden your knowledge in a relatively shorter period of time. If you acquire this breadth, you can easily understand the overall trends and get a bird's eye view of what's going on out there.

With the necessary groundwork in place, you've got the power to understand a new piece of knowledge by putting every piece of the puzzle in context. The breadth of your knowledge enables you to filter out insignificant information, while focusing on the topics that you've been interested in.

Circle of Knowledge

If you draw a circle on a piece of paper, you are actually defining a boundary between what you know and what you don't know. Inside the circle lies what you know, or terra cognita, and ouside it lies what you don't know, or terra incognita. You need to note that the circumference or the boundary is filled with doubts, curiosity, questions, and skepticism. As you learn more and broaden your knowledge, the circumference increases accordingly. That's why you get the feeling that you are losing grips on things even though you learn more. The proposition that you need to broaden your scope of knowledge first is telling you that you can increase the boundary, get exposed to the unknown, and ultimately conquer your terra incognita.

Facing a complex, new problem or a new piece of knowledge, Jane Doe with broad knowledge at hand is capable of discovering patterns from seemingly unrelated discipline by connecting the link between what she knows and what's facing her. This can be called strategic thinking, or the ability to step back and get the proverbial big picture before drilling down to the details.