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In this evergreen article, Sherif El-Henaoui takes a moment to explore the ever-present problem of judging without knowledge.

… they will never know. When they try, they will always learn.

I watch people dislike Airbnb, Tripadvisor, Uber, Twitter, alibaba, etc.. No problem disliking something in life except when one doesn’t have any clue about it…

In recent times I have been facing people, who discredit things they don’t understand even worse they don’t want to understand. If one never has taken an Uber ride, never bought or sold through Ebay, never visited a restaurant using Tripadvisor or never stayed somewhere using Airbnb, then please don’t allow yourself to judge, please shut up!

Instead when you hear about something you don’t know (and there tons), try to educate yourself as much as possible.

Asking someone in one’s network, who knows or has used this new thing. This gives a rough idea.

Then try to experiment with it, if there is a chance without taking a big risk or commitment – what does it take to take an Uber ride or drive an electric car?

Then use the result of this experience as the truth that allows to take a better decision and

Learn as you go

Is this a comprehensive judgment? No. But it allows us and our businesses to benefit from leading a curve and safes us the embarrassment of ignorance.

Of course not every new app / model succeeds and you can’t react to every “new thing”. Life has shown that many new things were useless, in particular for business, but hey what if we did a bet that completely went wrong.

Let me share two examples of recent technology development

Mobile telephony is a service where the mobility came at the expense of the quality of the conversation up to a level that bad quality telephony was tolerated. In the early days professionals refused mobile conversations. Now they can’t.

VoIP (or better known as skype-like) services were cheaper as opposed to the mobile or fixed telephony. Because of the accepted lower quality they became popular. More and more those “cheap” services started to replace fixed and also mobile telephony as all mobile devices are smart and more or less always connected to WLANs.

Key points include:

• Technology
• Trends
• Perception

Read the full article, When people judge …, on LinkedIn.