In my first job I traveled a lot between world capitals, often spending weeks at a time on an airplane supporting senior government officials and their teams. One of them was an especially interesting guy, extensive experience in business, politics, and government, and had a set of “rules” he would would give out. They really weren’t rules per se, but a collection of quotations and reflections based on his experiences, some funny, some thoughtful, that covered working in the White House and government, business, and how to stay sane in life in general. As a young officer I found them very valuable – I still have my signed copy. Later on he became (in)famous for saying ..
…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.
That is a restatement of something developed in the mid 1950’s known as the Johari Window. As a concept it’s been around for a while, especially in the intelligence and aerospace communities. The basic idea is that the things that you don’t know you don’t know are the ones that have the potential to cause you the most trouble. It’s a useful tool for assessing information and decision making. Recently several sociologists have suggested adding another category: things we do know, but don’t believe for one reason or another. And I think that is the most dangerous category of all, and what we are facing at this moment in several areas such as with this virus. People are thinking and acting like some information is unknown, when it is in fact known – but for various reasons don’t want to believe it.