Unknown known

The JC’S favourite Big Ideas™ →Go uptown There are six types of known. The Rumsfeld three: Known knowns: Things you do know you know; Known unknowns: Things you do know you don’t know; Unknown unknowns: Things you don’t know you don’t know; And the Jolly Contrarian three: Unknown knowns: Things you don’t know you do know. Not officially known: Things you know but the general public can’t prove. Knowable unknowns: Things you don’t know, but think you do know, for the time being, because computers. Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Big ideas The Devil’s Advocate Philosophy Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

— George Santayana

Unknown known
/ʌnˈnəʊn nəʊn/ (n.)

One type of unknown that doesn’t appear in Donald Rumsfeld’s taxonomy, but which should, since it is probably the source of more catastrophic events of our time than any of the others is the unknown known.

Unknown knowns are the things you do know, but you don’t know you know or, at least, conveniently forget you know at just the point it would have been most prescient to remember them. Things that, courtesy of that tremendous fiction, the corporate veil, an institution may be deemed to know, but about which none of its present representatives has the faintest clue; things which one might have once known but forgotten; things which one is in total denial about, and the unpleasant realities of our modern, complex world to which one is not, presently, facing up.

As Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek eloquently puts it: “the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values”.

Unknown knowns are a source of catastrophic risk, as the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 by the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 — hello, global financial crisis — and the continued use, even now, of the Black-Scholes option pricing methodology — goodbye, LTCM — which worked serviceably well to model the price of options except in times of market stress, when you most need it — ably demonstrates.

Unknown knowns also include the pandaemonium of devils in your detail: the 95% of the legal terms in your contractual portfolio that are neither reflected in any risk system, nor present in a single mortal hand or mind or eye in the organisation, but all of which were once, agreed to — here we use the passive advisedly, for no-one knows by whom — and thus still bind the firm, however long ago memorialised and how deeply buried in the organisation’s systemantic sediment. These are, in corporate theory, known, or deemed known, but until someone pulls the document in question and physically crawls through it, its amendments and vitiations over time to piece together what it means, they are unknown knowns.

Then there are articles of corporate faith which everyone knows perfectly well are useless, and damaging, but which when gathered together, the collected contrives to pretend are not: outsourcing, which prioritises unit cost over organisational complexity, skill and experience, notwithstanding well-established principles of design and lean production management, and the dear old 360° Performance appraisals which continue to not just cling to the dwindling autumnal cadence of a bad idea in its twilight years as you’d expect, but rude, fecund summer health, despite compendious research that it is ineffective, prone to abuse, widely resented, and as a promotion strategy suffers in comparison to promoting staff at random.

See also

• Rumsfeld’s taxonomy
• Risk taxonomy
• The devil is not in the detail. The devil is the detail
• LTCM
• Global financial crisis