Knowing What We Do Not Know
There is a story about epistemology in the public eye that sets up a subject I want to look at which has to do with knowing what we do and do not know. It was 2002 and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was fielding questions about whether the weapons were there or not. His response included an explanation that was much quoted at the time:
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.
Strip away the politics and this is a reasonable summary of what we know (and don’t know) about the world. And as business people throughout the ages have discovered, the most dangerous gaps in knowledge are the one’s we are not even aware of existing.
There is an older story that goes like this: A police officer finds a drunk man searching for his keys under a streetlight. “Did you lose them here?” the officer asks. “No,” replies the drunk, “I lost them in the park over there.” Puzzled, the officer asks why he’s searching under the light. “Because,” the drunk explains, “the light’s better here.”
Researchers call this the Streetlight Effect, and it’s a tendency we all share to search for answers only where it is convenient to look. This can lead to choosing to ask questions that our tools and processes can answer, rather than figuring out what questions really matter and asking those.
There is an even older story, told in Plato’s dialogue Meno. It’s around 380BCE and Plato has his two principal characters, Socrates and rich chap called Meno discussing discussing how to define Virtue. Meno gets annoyed with the round about course of the conversation, and issues this challenge to Socrates:
How will you search for something when you don’t know what it is? If you already knew it, you wouldn’t need to search. But if you don’t know it, how would you recognize it when you found it?
What has become known as Meno’s Paradox is a tricky one if you are thinking about learning and discovery. If I know what I am looking for, then I will recognize when I see it, so what’s the point in looking? And if I do not know what I am looking for, then inquiry seems impossible since I have no way of recognizing it when I see it.
In strategy conversations business can run into this paradox more than we would care to admit. Team members sometimes talk about ‘disruption’, and ‘adjacencies’, and even ‘strategy’ without a clear definition of what those words mean. So how will the recognize ‘A Strategy to Disrupt Adjacencies’ when they see it?
The three stories of Rumsfeld, the drunk under the streetlight and an irritated Meno point to a common thread we need to be aware of in strategy: Sometimes the biggest strategic threats and opportunities are to be found beyond our current frame of reference. We can look at the examples of Kodak, Blockbuster and Nokia to understand how something from the edge of knowledge became the worst threat.
If a strategic question has an obvious answer, then it is probably not strategic. So doing strategy means tackling things we do not know, and certainly things we do not yet know we do not know.
There are ways of preparing to handle ‘unknown unknowns’ however. One is to consider this often quoted explanation E.L. Doctorow gave on how he writes:
INTERVIEWER
Do you have any idea how a project is going to end?
DOCTOROW
Not at that point, no. It’s not a terribly rational way to work. It’s hard to explain. I have found one explanation that seems to satisfy people. I tell them it’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Consider the drunk and the streetlight - what if the streetlight could move in the manner of headlights on a car?
That’s how we do it then, by illuminating the regions around us as we go - but we still need a way of recognizing something for what it is when we see it.