Unknown known: Difference between revisions

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]].

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 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.

Unknown knowns also include the [[The devil is not in the detail. The devil is the detail|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 [[Systemantics: The Systems Bible|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]], [[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,<ref>So sayeth me.</ref> and as a promotion strategy suffers in comparison to ''promoting staff at random''.<ref>So sayeth [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984320300151? The Leadership Quarterly].</ref>