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You know what you know – and if you’re lucky, you know what you don’t know. But do you know what affects what you know without you knowing it?

Try saying THAT five times fast! It’s a mouthful. Lots of “knows” in there! 

This might be easier: do you ever sit back and think about where your knowledge, decisions, and understanding are coming from—and if all of that information is accurate?

We all have internal biases and are prone to errors in decision making. So do the people we work with.

And that means we often don’t know everything we really NEED to know about a situation we’re developing a plan for.

This is how the things going on inside our heads, and the things we have nothing to do with can influence the quality and success of our communications plans. Plus, we have to know how to mitigate the damage it can cause.

There are a whole lot of categories of things we don’t know. My personal list includes astrophysics, why it’s not legal to hunt squirrels for sport, and the economics of high-end children’s clothing.

Narrowing it down would be helpful now; we’re talking about how the things we don’t know relate to our communications strategy, after all. That means both our internal biases and the external factors that can throw us for a loop when we don’t stay aware that we don’t know everything. I mean, unless you’re me because my kid is still young enough to think I know everything. 

This happens a lot in politics and around the coronavirus. We find things that support the way we think and poo-poo facts that support a different opinion.

It’s a problem in our personal lives—and a bigger one in our professional lives.

We have confirmation bias, the curse of knowledge, and the context from which those two things stem. And that, my friends, is what we discuss on this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode.

About Gini Dietrich

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communications firm. She is the lead blogger at Spin Sucks and is the founder of Spin Sucks Pro. She is the co-author of Marketing in the Round and co-host of Inside PR. Full bio