Beware what you do not know

Category: Editorial

Some years ago we were running a five day residential course as part of our Future Managers Programme. On the Thursday evening, before the last day, one of the delegates rang his wife and when she asked him how he was getting on he replied. "What I have learned is that you don't know, what you don't know." Not having been with us for the week, she did not understand why her husband considered it to be so profound.

The basis of the programme was to help managers break out of hierarchical thinking and behaviour, and to take responsibility for their own future. The client company was a leader in its field in the international automotive industry. This and another British/American company were neck and neck, and a German company had fallen behind and was being written off by my clients. I had warned them that their greatest problem was the mediocrity of their competition; to compare their performance against the other company was to invite dangerous complacency.

Some time later the German company suddenly re-emerged, having completely re-structured and was now able to undercut the prices of the two leaders. They had not known what their competitor was doing and were unprepared. They did not know what they did not know.

I have been reminded of this by yet another criticism in the British press of Donald Rumsfeld's famous quotation. People in the UK seem to think that it is 'clear as mud'. If you listen or read it carefully, it is straightforward and an important warning. I quote:

"Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know."

In Rumsfeld's case it was indeed prescient because with America's reliance in high tech espionage and a lack of agents on the ground in Iraq, he was not aware that he did not know anything about the insurgence groups that would develop and attack his troops after the invasion.

What might be lurking in your future that you do not know about? We use scenario planning as a means of identifying what we can and cannot forecast or affect – and thus minimising the number of unknown unknowns.

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