The Known Unknowns
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About this newsletter
What makes this newsletter unique is that every two weeks, I share a chapter from my book It Depends: Writing on Technology Leadership 2012-2022, which Unit Circle Press released in March of last year. These chapters are not sequential; each is a standalone piece. In addition, a podcast serializes the audiobook in order, released alternate weeks from this newsletter.
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The latest episode of the podcast is “A Diversity Challenge: Tech Start-Ups Have a Great Opportunity.” It’s a short chapter about how start-ups can take advantage of the law of small numbers to improve diversity more easily than larger companies. In the current environment where many companies are getting rid of their diversity initiatives, I think it is more important than ever for start-ups to lead the way on diversity and utilize the advantages it gives to beat the larger companies. I shared this chapter in the newsletter last month, but as usual, I added much more context and commentary around it in the podcast, so it is worth listening to.
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About this week’s chapter
This chapter is the shortest in the book because the idea is straightforward. I am not a fan of Donald Rumsfeld, and I had to consider whether I wanted to quote him publicly. Still, this quote stuck in my head when I first heard it, and I often find myself returning to it when considering a new strategy or research project. It co-exists well with frameworks like SWOT, SOAR, or Cynefin and is a good pre-exercise for those. I will sometimes enumerate the known knowns, known unknowns and make some guesses as the unknown unknowns before moving forward to one of those frameworks to help clarify my thinking. This chapter appeared on the podcast in April of 2024.
This is chapter 9 of It Depends.
The Known Unknowns
Originally published on March 9, 2014
…there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.
Donald Rumsfeld
Last week, I held a day of training for the managers and folks interested in becoming managers in my organization. I did this with some of the folks from Spotify’s excellent People Operations team, Paolo Brolin Echeverria and Mats Oldin.
As part of the exercises, we identified which management skills, values, and responsibilities were the most critical for our organization. We then did something like a spider map to help us evaluate our competencies in these areas and set goals on how we’d like to improve over the next few months. The exercises were fantastic, and they identified some genuinely great qualities of managers and leaders that I hadn’t considered. I’ll try and write about them in the future.
One thing that struck me as I did this self-assessment was how low I rated myself in some areas. Areas that my managers had told me that I was strong in. I rated myself low in spaces that I would even call my strengths. The reason was that I had come to realize how much better I could be than I am right now. I knew how much more I had to learn, my known unknowns.
I had noticed this before in other areas. For years, when I interviewed C++ developers, one of my favorite questions was, “how do you rate your C++ skill on a scale from 1 to 10?” Sometimes, I’d add the context of “1 is your dog, and 10 is Bjarne Stroustrup.” I was looking for not an assessment of what they knew but an understanding of what they didn’t know: the known unknowns. I wrote C++ code professionally every day for over 15 years, and I would have rated myself a 7 (and that was before C++11 came out). Anyone who rated themselves higher than that either was just not being honest (it was an interview situation, after all), or they knew so little of the language that they didn’t have a clue how inexperienced they were.
I now realize that this is just part of mastery. You reach a plateau in your growth, and it seems like you are getting pretty good, but then you grow a bit more and realize there is so much more to learn—ad infinitum.
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