The former US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, gained fame, or perhaps infamy, from a 2002 news briefing from the podium at the Department of Defense. He said to the assembled Press Pack:
“Reports that say that 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. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”
It is unfortunate that Rumsfeld thereby became the butt of many popular jokes. However, a close read of his quote demonstrates just how profound – and realistic – his statement is.
Anyone involved in decision making in a VUCA world will be only too aware of the need to account for the unknows, and most especially the unknown unknowns. Therein lies the origin of much of the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity symbolised in the VUCA label.
The unknown unknowns are specifically accounted for in decision making frameworks such as the Cynefin framework, developed in 1999 by Dave Snowden at the IBM Research Labs, or the Stacey Matrix, developed by the organisational theorist Ralph Stacey from his work in chaos theory and complex adaptive systems.
Such frameworks provide powerful insights for leaders attempting to develop robust strategy in the face of complexity but they are far from easy to deploy in practice. An echo here of the oft-overlooked truth of Rumsfeld’s final sentence.
There is nothing new or profound in the preceding. There is, however, another dimension I’d like to touch upon – a dimension at a more human scale. A dimension in which the unknown is perhaps better represented by the unseen.
The ancients made much of the three centres of wisdom – the head, the heart and the gut. This finds expression, for example, in the Enneagram which is a remarkably insightful personal profiling tool. Interestingly, such concepts have found fresh impetus recently as tools for decision making in complex environments: the so-called three brains concept.
Such thinking encourages appropriate use of all wisdom centres in our thinking and decision making. In a real sense, three brains are better than one.
But Western society in particular, is very head-dominant. We often prize IQ above all else. One only has to consider the reluctance of many leaders (and organisations) to embrace the value of emotional intelligence – the heart-centred intelligence – to evidence this. The label of the ‘soft skills’ betrays the underlying assumption that heart-centred intelligence is fluffy and nice-to-have but not a fully-fledged leadership attribute on a par with IQ.
Ancient wisdom argues that all three – head, heart and gut – exist in a creative symbiosis – an intelligence ecosystem, if you like – and that an appropriate deployment of each enriches our decision making and leadership behaviours.
But what about the unseen? One might argue that what is unknown with the head might be seen – in the sense of being discerned or revealed – through the heart and gut centres.
Such seeing requires substantial effort and skill in accord with those required for knowing. In other words, this is not an easy nor leisurely activity but a process requiring aptitude and skill and application.
Rumi, the 13th Century Sufi scholar and poet put it like this:
“Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more – more unseen forms become manifest to him.”
Polishing the heart and clarifying the gut might just be imperatives for all leaders – imperatives that are hidden and overlooked and avoided. A topic to which I will return …
