Know What You Don’t Know: The Hidden Danger of Chauffeur Knowledge

Over the weekend, I had coffee with a friend who’s a senior management consultant. We got to talking about generative AI, and I mentioned how ChatGPT had helped me develop some holding lines for a recent engagement. He quickly interjected and confidently warned me about the dangers of hallucinations in large language models. At that moment, I realized something important: he had chauffeur knowledge.

What Is Chauffeur Knowledge?

There’s a classic story about Max Planck, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist. After delivering the same lecture across Germany, his chauffeur — who had memorized the talk — offered to give it in his place. The chauffeur recited the lecture flawlessly, using all the right words, expressions, and technical terms. But during the Q&A, when a real question came in, he was stumped. The illusion of knowledge crumbled.

This story illustrates a powerful truth: you can sound like an expert without truly being one. Chauffeur knowledge is the kind you can repeat but don’t fully understand.

When Chauffeur Knowledge Meets Corporate Titles

What concerned me most about the consultant wasn’t that he lacked depth of knowledge about AI. That’s understandable as most of us…