Unknown unknowns – Integration and Implementation Insights

Theory U: A promising journey to embracing unknown unknowns

May 11, 2020February 25, 2020

By Vanesa Weyrauch

author-venesa-weyrauch — Vanesa Weyrauch (biography)

How can we best live in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world? How can we shift from a worldview that looks to predict and control what is to be done through plans and strategies to being present and flexible in order to respond effectively as unexpected changes take place? How can we be open to not knowing what will emerge and embrace uncertainty as the opportunity to co-create and learn?

One powerful and promising way forward is Theory U, a change methodology developed by Otto Scharmer and illustrated below. Scharmer introduced the concept of “presencing”—learning from the emerging future. The concept of “presencing” blends “sensing” (feeling the future possibility) and “presence” (the state of being in the present moment). It acknowledges that we don’t know the answers. Staying at the bottom of the U until the best potential future starts emerging requires embracing uncertainty as fertile soil.

Why do we protect ourselves from unknown unknowns?

February 25, 2020February 11, 2020

By Bem Le Hunte

author-bem-le-hunte — Bem Le Hunte (biography)

Why do very few people enjoy sitting comfortably with their unknown unknowns? Why is there an uncomfortable liminality ‘betwixt and between’ the known and unknown worlds?

How can we explore unknowns in a more speculative, playful, creative capacity, through our imaginations? How can we use lack of knowledge to learn about ourselves and let it teach us how to be comfortable and curious in the midst of unknowing?

The power and allure of unknown unknowns have long been recognised by creative practitioners as a holy grail for inspiration.

How can resilience benefit from planning?

February 11, 2020January 28, 2020

By Pedro Ferreira

author - pedro-ferreira — Pedro Ferreira (biography)

Improved resilience can contribute to the ability to deal with unknown unknowns. Dealing with uncertainty is also at the core of every planning activity. The argument put forward here is that planning processes should be considered a cornerstone for any given resilience approach. An outline of planning and resilience is given, before presenting fundamental aspects of planning that should be strengthened within a resilience strategy.

Planning

From attempting to do as much as possible within a day’s work, to launching rockets into space or managing a nation, everything requires planning.

Detecting non-linear change ‘inside-the-system’ and ‘out-of-the-blue’

January 28, 2020January 14, 2020

Susan van ‘t Klooster and Marjolijn Haasnoot

Author - Susan van ‘t Klooster — Susan van ‘t Klooster (biography)

Change can be expected, envisioned and known, and even created, accelerated or stopped. But change does not always follow a linear and predictable path, nor is it always controllable. Novelty and surprise are inescapable features of life. Non-linear change can involve threats or opportunities.

Although it defines the world we live in, who we are, the outlooks we have and what we do, we often do not relate to non-linear change in a meaningful way. What is holding us back from engaging with it? How do we deal with non-linear change? And what are promising ways forward?

Yin-yang thinking – A solution to dealing with unknown unknowns?

June 23, 2020December 3, 2019

By Christiane Prange and Alicia Hennig

author - christiane prange — Christiane Prange (biography)

Sometimes, we wonder why decisions in Asia are being made at gargantuan speed. How do Asians deal with uncertainty arising from unknown unknowns? Can yin-yang thinking that is typical for several Asian cultures provide a useful answer?

Let’s look at differences between Asian and Western thinking first. Western people tend to prefer strategic planning with linear extrapolation of things past. The underlying mantra is risk management to buffer the organization and to protect it from harmful consequences for the business. But juxtaposing risk and uncertainty is critical. Under conditions of uncertainty, linearity is at stake and risk management limited.

Blackboxing unknown unknowns through vulnerability analysis

January 8, 2020November 19, 2019

By Joseph Guillaume

Author - Joseph Guillaume — Joseph Guillaume (biography)

What’s a productive way to think about undesirable outcomes and how to avoid them, especially in an unpredictable future full of unknown unknowns? Here I describe the technique of vulnerability analysis, which essentially has three steps:

Step 1: Identify undesirable outcomes, to be avoided
Step 2: Look for conditions that can lead to such outcomes, ie. vulnerabilities
Step 3: Manage the system to mitigate or adapt to vulnerable conditions.

The power of vulnerability analysis is that, by starting from outcomes, it avoids making assumptions about what led to the vulnerabilities.

Looking in the right places to identify “unknown unknowns” in projects

June 23, 2020November 5, 2019

Author - Tyson R. Browning — Tyson R. Browning (biography)

By Tyson R. Browning

Unknown unknowns pose a tremendous challenge as they are essentially to blame for many of the unwelcome surprises that pop up to derail projects. However, many, perhaps even most, of these so-called unknown unknowns were actually knowable in advance, if project managers had merely looked in the right places.

For example, investigations following major catastrophes (such as space shuttle disasters, train derailments, and terrorist attacks), and project cost and schedule overruns, commonly identify instances where a key bit of knowledge was in fact known by someone working on that project—but failed to be communicated to the project’s top decision makers. In other cases, unknown unknowns emerge from unforeseen interactions among known elements of complex systems, such as product components, process activities, or software systems.

Creative writing as a journey into the unknown unknown

January 8, 2020October 22, 2019

By Lelia Green

Author - Lelia Green — Lelia Green (biography)

Do you use writing as a means of accessing your unconscious knowledge and understanding? The electric experience of things falling into place is a well-recorded outcome of ‘writing to find out what you want to say.’ E. L. Doctorow is credited with saying that writing a novel is “like driving at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way” (no formal reference identifiable, but see Quotation Celebration). There is a sense of allowing the unfolding journey to deliver you to your destination, and experiencing the energy rush when you arrive. It’s a matter of relinquishing control and being open to the unexpected.

Managing innovation dilemmas: Info-gap theory

January 8, 2020October 8, 2019

By Yakov Ben-Haim

Author - Yakov Ben-Haim — Yakov Ben-Haim (biography)

To use or not to use a new and promising but unfamiliar and hence uncertain innovation? That is the dilemma facing policy makers, engineers, social planners, entrepreneurs, physicians, parents, teachers, and just about everybody in their daily lives. There are new drugs, new energy sources, new foods, new manufacturing technologies, new toys, new pedagogical methods, new weapon systems, new home appliances and many other discoveries and inventions.

Furthermore, the innovation dilemma occurs even when a new technology is not actually involved. The dilemma arises from new attitudes, like individual responsibility for the global environment, or new social conceptions, like global allegiance and self-identity transcending all nation-states. Even the enthusiastic belief in innovation itself as the source of all that is good and worthy entails a dilemma of innovation.

What do you know? And how is it relevant to unknown unknowns?

January 8, 2020September 24, 2019

By Matthew Welsh

Author - Matthew Welsh — Matthew Welsh (biography)

How can we distinguish between knowledge and ignorance and our meta-knowledge of these – that is, whether we are aware that we know or don’t know any particular thing? The common answer is the 2×2 trope of: known knowns; unknown knowns; known unknowns; and unknown unknowns.

For those interested in helping people navigate a complex world, unknown unknowns are perhaps the trickiest of these to explain – partly because the moment you think of an example, the previously “unknown unknown” morphs into a “known unknown”.

My interest here is to demonstrate that this 2×2 division of knowledge and ignorance is far less crisp than we often assume.

This is because knowledge is not something that exists in the world but rather in individual minds. That is, whether something is ‘known’ depends not on whether someone, somewhere, knows it; but on whether this person, here-and-now does.

How can we know unknown unknowns?

January 8, 2020September 10, 2019

By Michael Smithson

In a 1993 paper, philosopher Ann Kerwin elaborated a view on ignorance that has been summarized in a 2×2 table describing crucial components of metacognition (see figure below). One margin of the table consisted of “knowns” and “unknowns”. The other margin comprised the adjectives “known” and “unknown”. Crosstabulating these produced “known knowns”, “known unknowns”, “unknown knowns”, and unknown unknowns”. The latter two categories have caused some befuddlement. What does it mean to not know what is known, or to not know what is unknown? And how can we convert either of these into their known counterparts?

Accountability and adapting to surprises

March 9, 2020August 27, 2019

By Patricia Hirl Longstaff

Image of Patricia Hirl Longstaff — Patricia Hirl Longstaff (biography)

We have all been there: something bad happens and somebody (maybe an innocent somebody) has their career ruined in order to prove that the problem has been fixed. When is blame appropriate? When is the blame game not only the wrong response, but damaging for long-term decision making?

In a complex and adapting world, errors and failure are not avoidable. The challenges decision-makers and organizations face are sometimes predictable but sometimes brand new. Adapting to surprises requires more flexibility, fewer unbreakable rules, more improvisation and deductive tinkering, and a lot more information about what’s going right and going wrong. But getting there is not easy because this challenges some very closely held assumptions about how the world works and our desire to control things.