Life advice from Donald Rumsfeld that actually works.
Learn about yourself, your team and your business by uncovering known unknowns.
Fifteen years ago, Donald Rumsfeld held a famous press conference. He was asked a question about the lack of evidence suggesting Iraq was distributing weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, and as part of his answer, for whatever reason, briefly explained the concept of epistemology:
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 tend to be the difficult ones.
The reaction was broadly one of bafflement. It earned him the 2002 Foot in Mouth award by the Plain English Campaign. The poet Hart Seely included it in an anthology of Rumsfeld’s hidden poetry. It inspired a composer to create a new piece setting it to music.
Unlike everything else Rumsfeld said in the buildup to the war, uncharacteristically for him in general, and contrary to contemporary reaction, the answer actually contains an incredibly valuable insight that makes a huge amount of sense.
To actually get what that is we can benefit from a diagram:
The first thing to say is that this isn’t Rumsfeld’s idea. It’s called a Johari Window. It’s named after its creators, a pair of psychologists called Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, who designed it as a way of modelling our self-understanding in society, and to demonstrate the importance of feedback and reflection (more on which later).
It’s a very simple set of squares but the difference it can make to your team and your business is quite profound.
The squares on the left are the things we know about ourselves.
The squares on the right are the things that we don’t know about ourselves.
The squares on the top are the things others know about us, and the squares on the bottom are the things other people don’t know about us.
Inside the mind of Donald Rumsfeld
By way of example I’ve filled out one imaging I’m old Donny himself, in the picture above. The first thing to look at is the known knowns:
Everyone in the room, as well as Donny, knows he’s the Secretary of State. They know he’s wearing a red tie. They know he’s long-sighted, owing to the glasses. These are some of the more obvious and trivial things about him that we can see in the photograph.
As we move on to the things Donny knows that we don’t know, there’s a wealth of things he knows about himself but that he’s hidden from the rest of us.
He knows he’s not being totally honest about the evidence linking Iraq’s regime to WMD distribution.
He may also be sad about something he saw on the news that morning, or be worried about his dog’s hip dysplasia.
There’s also plenty of stuff we could know about him that he might not be aware of — the effect of his tone of voice on our understanding of him, for example.
Donny had no idea that Generals on his staff thought he had such abysmal military planning and such a lack of strategic understanding that they were eventually willing to publicly undermine him through the press to force him to resign.
The way he’s done his tie is also bad, I think — wide enough you could comfortably land a 737 on it.
Finally we have the unknown unknowns, things neither he himself nor the rest of us know about him. Like what his genetic information has in store for him as an older gentlemen.
Or whether he has an irrational fear of newts.
Or that his love of Winston Churchill could eventually manifest into his becoming an iOS app developer.
There are ways of finding all these things out, of course. But we have to actively look for them, or wait for them to happen to us.
The exact same thing is true of your team, your business, your customers, and you as an individual.
Here’s one for a breakfast cereal brand that you run (it’s called ‘Fantastic Flakes’ and I’ve just made it up and it’s delicious):
You and your customers both agree that your cereal is a little tastier than the competition — and a little more expensive to compensate. You sell it on the basis of it having plenty of healthy vitamins baked in, and your customers say it’s one of the things they appreciate about it.
You know some other things about your cereal that customers don’t, though; that it’s way, way more expensive to make than the competition, and that you spend a fortune marketing it to them. Of every bowl they eat, you’re spending about two-thirds of the income making them think it’s a delicious, healthy snack. You also know exactly how much sugar is in it — they kind of know it’s a sugary cereal, but being so aggressively sold on its health benefits people tend to ignore and forget that knowledge.
There are also plenty of things that your customers could tell you about your product as well. You had no idea it was such a hit among coeliacs, and it was never your intention to make it one — you’ve not spent any money marketing to them, and that means there’s a huge audience ready and some evangelists already selling it for you on forums and meetup groups.
Your customers also know that kids hate it. It’s a grown-up, healthy cereal, they don’t want any part of that! Again, you didn’t want that to be the case, and you’ve been selling it at peak TV times without any idea that parents definitely weren’t buying it for their kids, so you could save a boatload of money by stopping that spending.
You also had no idea of it’s exclusivity — or, at least, the feeling of exclusivity that was conferred on buyers because of it’s price point. “It’s a cereal!”, you had previously thought, “the difference is only 50p per pack!”. But to them it makes a big difference.
Learning this stuff is invaluable — it means you can shift and change away from unproductive or unnecessary work and into the actually productive stuff. You can get an idea of what to do next, which customers you should focus on and what needs they really have.
Here’s where it might get slightly personal, because you can also use it on yourself to try to understand what makes you productive, sad, stressed, whatever.
Here’s one I’ve quickly done for me based on feedback I’ve had from people through the years:
I know I’m quite quiet and, broadly, it’s immediately obvious to people. I’m an OK writer — not Hemingway, but also better than plenty of other people that write. I can use Sketch, and Photoshop, and I’ve done that with teams I’ve been in before so they know that too.
But, also, there are things I know about myself that others might not — that the bottom shelf of my fridge is broken, and that’s making me tense because I have to deal with my sodding landlord. That socialising is trickier for me than more extroverted folks. That I’m in my overdraft at the bank, which might make me tense about spending what I describe as London Money (same denominations as in Manchester but with a 1.9x modifier) with friends or at lunchtime.
There’s also plenty of stuff that, before speaking to people and asking for feedback, I had no idea about.
I had no idea that my choosing my words so carefully before I speak could come off as hiding what I actually think, or even as being deliberately intimidating. I’ve been told a few times by people that the long pauses I take before speaking when asked a question can be really tense for them, for any number of reasons.
There’s still plenty of bits of myself I have absolutely zero idea of as well. I don’t really know how I’d cope under incredible pressure, like a long-term illness or a car crash or something. Eventually I or somebody I know will figure these out, though, so I have to keep looking for them.
Why bother?
The core of really good work is feeling happy and secure — there’s lots of evidence and case studies that happier employees are more productive, and that psychological safety and trust are hugely important in building that.
Knowing that the way I articulate myself has an effect on teammates, or having my colleagues know that dealing with my landlord is stressing me out, builds up to that cumulative feeling of safety for all of us.
The easiest way to start is just to ask people two questions:
What do you appreciate about [working with me / our product / our company]?
What would you like to see [me / our product / our company] do differently?
Give them five minutes to think.
Write down what people say to you, and remember it.
Don’t challenge it, or defend yourself from criticism — it’s not about being right or wrong, just getting other people’s perceptions down.
After they’re finished, say thank you.
You don’t have to change your behaviour immediately.
You don’t have to do anything.
But if the same feedback keeps coming up, it’s a really good signal something should probably change.
Same principle for the things you make or sell.
There will likely always be things in the Unknown Unknowns, but the more you get feedback from others the less you have to worry about them, and the more you can work on stuff that will make a real difference to yourself, your products, or your team.
Dominic White works at Fluxx, a company that uses design research to understand customers, helping clients to build better products. He’s previously written about why Simon Sinek is wrong about millenials and institutional isomorphism. Fluxx works with organisations such as Atkins, National Grid, the Parliamentary Digital Service and William Hill to turn ideas into functioning new businesses.
