If you were asked direction to a location you didn’t recognise, what would you do? You might get out your phone and go to a source of information – a mapping app – and see if that might provide the data you need. You might suggestion the person speak to someone with more knowledge of the local area. Or you might simply say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know”.

But what if you were asked your opinion? Well you’d have to have the answer, right? Because we all have an opinion on everything. But should we?

Anyone who has known me for a period of time will know that, in the past, I’ve not been short of an opinion or twelve. Whether it is age, fatigue or, (with a more generous filter) the advent of wisdom, I’ve found myself expressing fewer and fewer (in fact that’s one of the reasons I haven’t written on here for over a year). Perhaps needing to express fewer opinions is a more accurate description and yet it comes at a time when the world seems to be going the other way – particularly on social issues.

We are losing the art of intentionally not knowing and replacing it with mass produced “oven ready” positions shared by both social and traditional media. Not only does this place at risk one of the fundamental drivers of progress, human curiosity, but it also significantly impedes our ability to actually identify the root cause of issues or challenges that we are trying to solve and replaces them with a dumbed down artificial, and often polarised, “solutions”.

You can apply this to so many of the key challenges we have – immigration, housing, economic growth, creating fairer workplaces, even conflict. Deeply complex and complicated issues that are beyond the proper comprehension of most of us are reduced to soundbites as we seek not to understand but instead to apportion blame. And in a world where “cut through” is king, this feeds the approach that our politicians and the media take, creating a vicious cycle that gives a sense of action without going anywhere.

Another option is to take the same approach to our opinions on topics we don’t understand as to being asked for directions. We could seek out sources of information, we could seek out people with more knowledge of the topic, or we could simply say, “I don’t know”.