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-{{a|devil|[[File:Rumsfeld.png|450px|thumb|center|I ''knew'' you were going to say that.]]{{unknowns}}}}{{d|Unknown known|/ʌnˈnəʊn nəʊn/|n|}}{{santayana}}
+{{a|bi|{{knownbox}}}}{{santayana}}
-One type of [[unknowns|unknown]] that doesn’t appear in [[Rumsfeld’s taxonomy - Risk Article|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]].
+{{d|Unknown known|/ʌnˈnəʊn nəʊn/|n|}}
-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.
+One type of [[unknowns|unknown]] that doesn’t appear in [[Rumsfeld’s taxonomy - Risk Article|Donald Rumsfeld’s taxonomy]] of “knowns”, but which ''should'', since it is the source of ''more'' catastrophe in our time than any of the others, is the [[unknown known|“unknown known]]”.
-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 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.
-[[Unknown known]]s are a source of catastrophic {{risk|risk}}, as the repeal of the [[Glass-Steagall Act]] in 1999 by the [[Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999]] — hello, [[global financial crisis]]<ref>Yes, yes — I know it wasn’t ''just'' the repeal of [[Glass-Steagall Act|Glass-Steagall]] — [[David Bowie]] was also partly responsible — but it didn’t help, did it?</ref> — 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.
+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; generally, the unpleasant realities of our modern, [[complex]] world to which one is not, presently, facing up.
-Other variations include [[outsourcing]], which prioritises unit cost over organisational [[complexity]], [[Subject matter expert|skill and experience]], notwithstanding well-established principles of [[design]] and [[lean production management]], and the dear old [[360]]° [[Performance appraisal]]s 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,<ref>So sayeth [https://hbr.org/2019/01/why-most-performance-evaluations-are-biased-and-how-to-fix-them the Harvard Business Review].</ref> prone to abuse,<ref>So sayeth [https://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/the-problem-with-performance-reviews/ the New York Times].</ref> widely resented, and as a promotion strategy suffers in comparison to ''promoting staff at random''.
+They are as Slavoj Žižek puts it:
+{{Quote|“the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.”}}
+[[Unknown known]]s are a source of catastrophic {{risk|risk}}, as the repeal of the [[Glass-Steagall Act]] in 1999 by the [[Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999]] — hello, [[global financial crisis]]<ref>Yes, yes — I know it wasn’t ''just'' the repeal of [[Glass-Steagall Act|Glass-Steagall]] — [[David Bowie]] was also partly responsible — but it didn’t help, did it?</ref> — and the continued use, even now, of the [[Black-Scholes]] option pricing methodology — goodbye, [[LTCM]], Lehman, Bear Stearns,  — which worked serviceably well to model the price of options ''except in times of market stress, when you most need it'' — demonstrates.
+=== Contract databases as unknown knowns ===
+Unknown knowns include the [[The devil is not in the detail. The devil is the detail|pandaemonium of devils in your detail]]: the great preponderance of legal terms in your contract portfolio that still bind the firm but are neither reflected in any risk system nor alive in the minds of  a single soul in the organisation, but which were once, by someone, ''agreed to'' — here we use the [[passive]] deliberately, for no-one knows ''by whom'' — and thus they lurk there, ''known but at the same time not known'', buried deep in the organisation’s [[Systemantics: The Systems Bible|systemantic]] sediment.
+These are, in corporate theory, known, or ''[[Deem|deemed]]'' known: courtesy of each, the firm is short an option — [[out-of-the-money]], no doubt, but volatile and liable to swing suddenly, should a customer pitch up unexpectedly and insist upon them, or should a regulator, in the aftermath of a disaster, require a hindsight audit of your portfolio.
+But until someone actively pulls the document in question and crawls through it — and that means ''wanting'' to look through it, when the institutional wisdom of [[plausible deniability]] counsels sharply ''against'' asking hypothetical questions to which you don’t know the answer — the sum total of information in your contract database comprises “''unknown'' knowns”.
+=== Management truisms ===
+Then there are articles of management dogma which everyone knows perfectly well are stupid, useless, and damaging, but which when gathered together, the collected contrives to pretend are sensible ways of managing risk: [[Right-sizing|offshoring]] and  [[outsourcing]], prioritising cost over organisational [[complexity|simplicity]], preferring form and process to [[Subject matter expert|skill and experience]], notwithstanding well-established principles of [[design]] and [[lean production management]], and the great saws of human resources: forced ranking, [[natural attrition]], [[360]]° [[Performance appraisal]]s and [[Goals|SMART]] goals that are derived from them — articles of faith which continue to not just cling to the dwindling autumnal cadence of a bad idea in its twilight years as you’d expect, but remain in rude, fecund, fruity summer health, despite compendious research that they are ineffective,<ref>So sayeth [https://hbr.org/2019/01/why-most-performance-evaluations-are-biased-and-how-to-fix-them the Harvard Business Review].</ref> prone to abuse,<ref>So sayeth [https://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/the-problem-with-performance-reviews/ the New York Times].</ref> widely resented,<ref>So sayeth me.</ref> and as a promotion strategy that they suffer in comparison to ''promoting staff at random''.<ref>So sayeth [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984320300151? The Leadership Quarterly].</ref>
 {{sa}}
 *{{risk|Rumsfeld’s taxonomy}}
 *{{Risk|Risk taxonomy}}
+*[[The devil is not in the detail. The devil is the detail]]
 *[[LTCM]]
 *[[Global financial crisis]]
 {{sa}}