We are all Donald Rumsfeld

In a Pentagon news conference on Feb. 12, 2002, United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a now-famous response to a question about the lack of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups:

“…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.”
Donald Rumsfeld, “There are unknown unknowns.”

For full context, here’s the whole exchange. Though it has been widely criticized as an evasive non-answer to an important question, Rumsfeld thought highly enough of his remark that he borrowed from it for the title of his controversial memoir, Known and Unknown.

Rumsfeld’s remark includes three of the four boxes of what’s often called the Rumsfeld matrix, which pops up in all kinds of fields, such as the epistemology of knowledge, risk assessment, project management, strategic planning, and, as illustrated below, creative design.

An illustration of the Donald Rumsfeld matrix

A different take on the Rumsfeld matrix

An illustration of the Donald Rumsfeld matrix

All of the examples above apply the Rumsfeld matrix to explore different kinds of analysis. What no one discusses, as far as I know(!), are the potential pitfalls of Rumsfeld’s categories. So, my take on the Rumsfeld matrix is—what if you’re wrong? Here are the consequences of incorrectly assigning one’s belief about one’s knowledge to the wrong box.

What you know you know

It’s great to know what you know. Until you’re wrong, either because you don’t actually know what you think you know, or because what you “know” is wrong.

Because everyone makes mistakes. I’m sometimes wrong about what I think I know, and since you’re probably, like me, not perfect you are too.

For example, I tell a client that I know how to do something, and then when they ask me to do it I discover that I can’t. Or, I confidently give incorrect advice.

This is obviously dangerous. Misplaced confidence in one’s knowledge has caused countless tragedies. We have a word for this: hubris.

What you know you don’t know

There are times when you’re wrong about knowing that you don’t know. Sometimes it turns out that, when the chips are down, you do know! (See the next section below.)

For example, fifty years ago I had four years of French classes in school and have barely used it since. My French is terrible. Nevertheless, every once in a while, the French word for something I would have sworn I didn’t know just pops into my head.

The good news is that believing that you don’t know something that you actually do is not dangerous. Underestimating your abilities is, at most, mildly embarrassing.

What you don’t know you know

This is the matrix box that Rumsfeld didn’t mention, though he refers to it in his memoir. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know that you know! In fact, there are probably more things that you don’t know you know than things you know you know! (I’ll wait while you figure out that sentence.) This box is about tacit knowledge, which I wrote about here.

For example, I never learned to touch type. If you asked me to list the QWERTY keyboard layout I’ve been typing on for fifty years, I’d have a hard time deriving it from memory. Despite this, I can type with three or four fingers far faster than the hunt and peck I used for the first few months on a typewriter.

Tacit knowledge is a bonus. It’s not dangerous. Thank goodness for that!

What you don’t know you don’t know

Finally, we get to the most dangerous region of the Rumsfeld matrix. When we are born, we don’t know what we don’t know. And we’re helpless, completely reliant on other humans for our survival. Slowly we pick up knowledge, making discoveries constantly. But there are always things we don’t know that we don’t know. They bedevil us our whole lives. This has been true for every culture throughout history, including ours right now.

By definition, I can’t give you a current example of what I don’t know I don’t know! That’s what makes this box so dangerous. But we can extrapolate from the past. For example, look at the history of our beliefs about what causes illness. Cultures believed that illness was caused by evil spirits and gods, or an excess of blood in the body. Today, these are rare beliefs.

In 1968, Stewart Brand wrote on the title page of his first Whole Earth Catalog, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” In my opinion, he was wrong, though on the back page of the final Catalog he wrote, “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish“, which I see as a partial repudiation. What we can learn from this box is that, as Shakespeare has Hamlet say, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” We need to remember that we don’t know all the right answers; we don’t even know all the right questions!

In other words, we need to remain humble in the face of a universe that has not shared all its secrets.

We are all Donald Rumsfeld

We are all Donald Rumsfeld. We are all susceptible to hubris and overlooking how little we actually know in the likely scheme of things. If we strive to avoid hubris and stay humble, our world will be a better place.

Image attribution: www.team-consulting.com

Two ways to handle a major obstacle to change

How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change. In this post, we’ll explore two ways to handle a major obstacle to change.
major obstacle to change: an illustration of "Knowledge as Iceberg", showing explicit "know what" knowledge visible, "live in books and heads" and tacit "know how" knowledge below the surface "lives in people and their practices"
One of the reasons it’s so hard to change is because so much of what we “know” is tacit. Tacit knowledge is that which cannot be easily shared verbally or in writing—as Michael Polanyi says, “…we can know more than we can tell.” A simple example of tacit knowledge is how to ride a bicycle.

Not only is tacit knowledge hard to transmit, we are often not even aware that we know it ourselves. We all possess unexamined and/or unconscious beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that can limit our ability to see, question, or act on desirable change in our life and work.

It’s hard enough when we don’t know what we know. But what happens when some of our tacit knowledge is incorrect or inaccurate? Here’s what Chief of Confusion John Seely Brown says:

It turns out that this learning to unlearn may be a lot trickier than a lot of us at first think. Because if you look at knowledge, and look at least two different dimensions of knowledge, the explicit dimension and the tacit dimension, the explicit dimension probably represents a tiny fraction of what we really do know, the explicit being the concept, the facts, the theories, the explicit things that live in our head. And the tacit turns out to be much more the practices that we actually use to get things done with…

…Now the problem is that an awful lot of the learning that we need to do is obviously building up this body of knowledge, but even more so the unlearning that we need to do has to do with challenging the tacit. The problem is that most of us can’t easily get a grip on. It is very hard to reflect on the tacit because you don’t even know that you know. And in fact, what you do know is often just dead wrong. And it is almost impossible to change your beliefs about something that is in the tacit and is different from what you happen to think.
—John Seely Brown, Storytelling: Scientist’s Perspective

Tacit knowledge acts like an invisible force that guides and constrains our potential choices and actions. This makes unlearning incorrect or inaccurate tacit knowledge seem like a hopeless task.

Two tools for working with a major obstacle to change

Surprisingly, there are tools available that allow us to become aware of and work with our tacit knowledge. The key insight: we can overcome our inability to reflect on our tacit knowledge, by working with others!

Conversation

While it’s common to think of knowledge as being something an individual possesses, in reality, knowledge is socially constructed with others. (Remember Socrates in ancient Greece, pursuing knowledge through dialog?) This leads us to the first tool to free ourselves from the limitations arising from what we don’t know we know: conversation with others. Other people can see our blind spots and share with us what they see. By reflecting and gently challenging the beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that form our tacit knowledge, they can help us see what we cannot and provide us an opening to, at least, become aware of what was formerly invisible to us.

Storytelling

The second tool available to us is one of the most powerful ways to see and process the boundaries and consequences of our tacit knowledge: storytelling.

We can explore our tacit knowledge via storytelling in two ways:

We are not alone

Conversation and stories create frameworks that can help us transcend some of the barriers to change imposed by our tacit knowledge. I think it’s fitting that we need to connect and engage with others to do this important work.

Photo attribution: John Seely Brown