When Knowing Is No Longer Enough

I was wondering… when does knowing stop being enough?

Not because we lack knowledge, answers, or experience. But because the way we have been living with what we know no longer feels steady - especially as the unknown presses closer into our lives.

This time of year has a way of bringing such questions nearer to the surface. We reflect. We take stock. We look back at what has worked - and what no longer quite fits. Many of us arrive here having invested years in learning, working, building what you think is meaningful - carrying responsibility, meeting expectations, doing our best to get it “right.” And yet, beneath the surface, there can be a subtle restlessness. A sense that something in the way we’ve been deciding, leading, or living no longer feels quite right.

Looking back on my own journey, I can see now that moments like this had been reoccurring all throughout my life.

By 2020, I could see that my relationship with knowledge had been shaped over many chapters. I had spent more than two decades deeply immersed in science, systems, and knowledge. I was first drawn to medicine, then to computer science, and eventually to a PhD in information science, specialising in knowledge management.

From there, my life unfolded inside universities and research centres, classrooms and boardrooms - teaching, publishing, leading academic initiatives, and working closely with organisations on how knowledge is created, shared, and used to support decision-making. Over time, I moved between roles as researcher, professor, academic leader, and advisor, living fully inside the world of knowledge as discipline, system, and practice.

I loved the discipline. I loved the rigour. I loved the clarity that well-structured knowledge can bring. I trusted frameworks, models, and systems. They gave me language, confidence, and a way of navigating complexity. For a long time, they were enough.

And yet, even at the height of professional success, something kept tugging at me - gently at first, then more insistently. A sense that knowing more was no longer the same as knowing more wisely. That something essential was missing - not from the field itself, but from how it was being lived through us. I began to notice signals I had once learned to overlook: intuition stirring beneath analysis, the body responding before the mind could explain, questions that didn’t ask to be solved, but to be listened to.

I didn’t yet have the language for this. Only a growing awareness that the way I was knowing - deciding, leading, teaching - was asking to evolve. That the questions I was carrying did not need faster answers, but space. Space to listen. Space to sense. Space to allow understanding to take shape not only in thought, but in lived experience.

That awareness eventually coincided with a sabbatical - a disconnection from the usual academic rhythm, from the expectations and momentum of the academic year. At the time, I did not yet see it as a turning point. I travelled to Boston intending to remain engaged - to collaborate across disciplines, to widen the conversation beyond the familiar contours of my field.

And then, almost overnight, the world closed. Universities shut their doors. Schedules dissolved. Certainties fell away. What I had imagined as a structured pause became something far more open - and far more demanding. There was suddenly time. Time to read. Time to listen. Time to reach outward and inward. Time to sit with questions I had long postponed because there was always another paper to write, another program to lead, another decision to make.

In that unexpected stillness, something became clearer. The questions I was carrying were not intellectual gaps to be filled. They were invitations. Invitations to notice how knowledge was shaping not only decisions, but lives. How speed was rewarded while sense-making was sidelined. How expertise could grow sharper even as wisdom quietly thinned.

I was coming to understand - slowly - that some forms of knowledge do not mature through accumulation. They mature through movement. Through a cyclical rhythm of experience and reflection, engagement and contemplation. Through meeting the world - and then returning inward - again and again. What we come to know is shaped by how we live, just as how we live is shaped by what we come to know. One does not evolve without the other.

It was only later that this way of knowing was mirrored back to me through people I encountered along the way.

One such moment stays with me clearly. Many years ago, at a Knowledge Management conference in Houston, I met Jackson Grayson - the founder of APQC. He was already in his nineties at the time, a visionary who had helped shape the field itself. What struck me most in our conversation was not his achievements, but his relationship with the unknown.

Jackson never seemed afraid of not having all the answers. He did not wait for certainty before moving. He trusted that knowing unfolds through engagement - that clarity emerges as we step forward, not before. There was a deep confidence in the way he spoke about life and work, as if he understood that knowledge is not something we complete, but something we live into.

Before we parted, he gave me a small plaque. It sits on my desk to this day. It reads:

“Freedom to Dream. Courage to Act.”

That moment stayed with me. A reminder that Knowing is not about eliminating uncertainty, but about developing the inner capacity to move with it. To act with care, responsibility, and trust - even when the path ahead is not fully mapped.

Looking back, I can see how much that encounter mirrored what I was already sensing in my own journey: that wisdom does not arrive fully formed, and that waiting for perfect answers can sometimes keep us from living the questions that are shaping us.

From there, the path forward became less about accumulating insight, and more about listening to what life itself was asking of me.

Leaving academia was not a rejection of knowledge, but a commitment to honour it more fully. A willingness to step beyond what could be easily justified, measured, or explained - and to trust that another way of knowing was asking to emerge. One that could hold intellect and intuition together. Structure and sensibility. Thinking and embodiment. Knowing and responsibility.

That choice was neither sudden nor dramatic. It was gradual, careful, and at times unsettling. It asked me to loosen my grip on familiar forms of certainty - titles, trajectories, external validation - and to stay present with a deeper question:How do I want to live with what I know?

What I began to see is that knowledge does not mature on its own. It matures through contact with life. Through responsibility. Through allowing what we know to be unsettled - and reshaped - by who we are becoming.

This is where Knowledge Mindfulness began to take form. Not as a concept I set out to design, but as a living space that emerged through the meeting of opposites: knowing and not knowing, clarity and uncertainty, action and pause. A practice rooted in the understanding that knowledge is a living system - shaped by experience, relationship, responsibility, and care - and that how and why we come to know matters as much as what we know.

If you find yourself here - questioning, pausing, sensing that something is asking to shift - it may not be because you lack clarity. It may be because your Knowing is ready to evolve and mature.

Perhaps the invitation is not to wait for all the answers before we move, but to move with care even when the answers are still forming. To trust that understanding does not arrive all at once, but continues to emerge as we pay attention, respond, and adapt along the way.

Knowledge, like a river, needs to flow. As it moves, it shapes its banks - and those banks, in turn, shape its course. In this ongoing movement between Knowing and not Knowing, between clarity and uncertainty, wisdom does not accumulate; it evolves.

With care for “All,”Dr. Laila Marouf and the KMD Team