Surrounded by armed private soldiers, from whom I think I derived an unsuspecting sense of comfort, the reminder rang loud and clear that we don’t know what we don’t know. Spending the weekend in Afghanistan listening to leaders talk about economic recovery and the country’s future, two competing trains of thought raced in my mind — what I don’t know and what they don’t.

On the surface, it is really frustrating when you know something that someone else doesn’t, but you think they should.

Rather intrigued by the Special Forces trained military apparatus charged with our safety, I found it ironic that it actually reiterated my premise. As we drove down the roads and toured parts of the country, I asked numerous questions about the protective cars in front and behind us.

I was soaking in what was their everyday reality. I was curious what life was like for the common Afghani. I even wanted to know elements of their recent history that they would assume everyone knew as well as they did.

But I didn’t, I knew nothing about everyday life, minimally about their recent history other than what you can read in the newspaper. Yet, my hosts didn’t get frustrated.

Which really surprised me as I found myself getting frustrated by what they didn’t know. In our talks about economic recovery, what I thought everyone should know proved to be novel.

A week later I had the same exact experience, sans the armed protection. This time I was with the senior management team of a family-owned, regional and pan-African powerhouse. Again, what I thought everyone should know, they didn’t.

But they assumed they knew everything they needed to know.

Then it hit me — we only know what we know and it is too easy to think we know everything because we know all we do. But, only knowing we know what we know means we don’t know what we don’t know.

The connection between the two experiences is exposure — what you are exposed to is a regulator for what you know. We should be more precise.

In the examples above the fault is a lack of exposure. In both cases, Afghanistan — my not knowing much about them and their not knowing what I was referencing — and the family business — their only seeing from their perspective — stemmed from limited exposure.

At one point in Afghanistan 75 per cent of the people on the table had never been outside of the country. An even higher percentage of the senior management team of the family business has only worked in that company.

The leadership point emerging from both of these examples is you don’t know everything. Matter of fact, you may know much less than you should and accepted it as enough.

You need to look beyond your limited field of vision to increase your exposure so you can know more.

Your field of vision is the extent of the observable world to you. Rather than allowing your current view to be a blind spot that restricts what you see and results in limited knowledge, stand up from your chair and grab a pair of binoculars to see far into the distance.

Don’t limit your view by what you have seen, set out to see more and know more in order to open up.

To broaden what you know you need to increase your exposure. By taking in more, you see what you don’t know and this becomes the motivator to actually learn more. Exposure and knowledge give you a competitive advantage as they broaden your perspective, thus allowing you to be the one who sees what others don’t.

To be a great leader, you need to expand your vision. You shouldn’t rely on what you already know; doing so is a classic leadership blinder.

Leadership success and learning are inseparable. Never stop learning, instead always strive to know more.

The writer is a CEO Coach and author, including of the ‘10 Tips for Leading in the Middle East’. Contact him at tsw@tommyweir.com