Some thoughts about a famous 20 year-old quote and what it means for how to learn and strategize
In 2002, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was conducting a briefing about the possible link between Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. At one point, a member of the press asked about a report that something hadn’t happened. Rumsfeld took the opportunity to turn the event into a masterclass of obscure epistemology (the study of knowledge):
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.
Just to run through that succinctly, Rumsfeld identifies 3 categories. And each has their own position and usage in our life. And when you can learn to identify each one, and how to appropriately identify them, it can be extremely helpful.
Known Knowns (KK)
Known Knowns are the things we know that we know. It’s also referred to as second-order knowledge, because you not only know these things, but you’re aware that you know them. On some level, you’re conscious of that knowledge.
Basically, this is most of your knowledge base. Things you know to be true, and you’re aware that you know them. An example would be: I know that I know where all the doors in my house are located. Also, I know the multiplication table up to 12.
When we think of learning, we’re mainly thinking about expanding this particular category of knowledge. We read books and collect more known knowns. And the knowing that we know comes from retention of what we’ve learned. This often requires consistent review of the material from which we learned new things, or use of that knowledge — so we can integrate into our other knowledge.
But there is more to learning that expanding our known knowns. In fact, as we’ll see, the journey of learning begins with a different category first. And identifying more of that category is a much better way to getting both smarter and wiser.
Known Unknowns (KU)
Known Unknowns are things we know that we don’t know. You could call it our “ignorance base”. It’s worth emphasizing that this is different from our normal understanding of ignorance. For example: I know that I don’t know how to replace the fan belt on my car. I also know that I don’t know the names of all of the members of congress from my home state.
When we think of being ignorant of something, we often think of not even begin aware of an entire realm of possible knowledge. And that’s usually a result of not caring enough to find out what you don’t know.
Effective learning begins — and lifelong learning continues — by seeking out more and more things to add to the list of your known unknowns. Because the first step to learning about a subject is to find out what it is you don’t know. When you do that, learning about the subject becomes a lot easier, because you’ve got a blank to fill in — so to speak.
In school, we were most often taught that learning involves just showing up and listening to something. But this can only be so effective at teaching us new things. Learning that sticks, and that propels you forward toward more learning, happens most effectively when we identify the gaps in our knowledge. It’s helpful to have a list — whether on paper or in your head — of these known unknowns about various topics. This way, your learning is guided by a need to fill in those gaps, and make those KUs into KKs.
Unknown Unknowns (UU)
Perhaps the most interesting category of the Rumsfeld Trio is the Unknown Unknowns. These are things we don’t know that we don’t know. In other words, you may have thought about a topic, but these would be the things that you didn’t even consider about that topic. So, like the known unknowns (KU) you don’t know them. But moreover, you’re not even aware of your own ignorance of these things.
That last category is basically impossible to give an example of regarding oneself, because once you give an example of something you weren’t aware you didn’t know — you would no longer be unaware you didn’t know it. But we can give examples of unknown unknowns that became known later on — showing us that we weren’t even aware of the things we didn’t know.
Things in this (UU) category are like Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swan” events, but perhaps even crazier. Taleb’s description of a Black Swan event is basically an event regarded as rare thus unanticipated, but that has significant consequences — due in large part to its being unanticipated.
Taleb gives the example of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 2001. Nobody seriously anticipated that 4 commercial planes would be hijacked and run into buildings. And if anyone had, it’s likely that the event wouldn’t have had the massive effect it did. According to the intelligence community at that time, there was a notable lack of terrorist “chatter” before September 11th. There may have been fears or speculations of an attack around that time, but no solid leads. There were a lot of unknowns.
9/11 was a black swan event due precisely to its unknown unknown nature.
But there were people who claim that scenarios like 9/11 had been thought about by strategists before they happened. So while it may have been highly improbable, and highly unanticipated, given the intel we had at the time, they weren’t true unknown unknowns. We knew what we didn’t know: the who, where, and when of a choreographed hijacking.
The Gateway to Strategy
Unknown Unknowns are actually a great gateway drug to creative strategizing. What makes games, negotiations, and (to some people) war campaigns so interesting and engaging is the requirement that you search out the unknown unknowns.
When we do strategy well, we stretch beyond the familiar, beyond the anticipated. We consider things that aren’t on most people’s radars. It is those who can find these unknown unknowns, turn them into known unknowns, and then into known knowns — they can think at a consistently higher level.
A Fourth Category?
There also may be an additional category at work — one which Rumsfeld didn’t mention. But philosopher Slavoj Žižek talks about it in his own analysis of what Rumsfeld said:
If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns” — the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.
Political conclusion aside, I think Žižek is on to something. There clearly is something like this at work in our minds. They’re things that we know, but we’re not aware that we know them. They can be “disavowed beliefs that operate in the background of our consciousness” or they can be intellectual muscle memory. These might be subconscious things you know, but that only come up in certain circumstances.
It could be argued, that when we get to know something well enough, it becomes embedded and unconscious in us. And at that point, we don’t have to consciously call up that knowledge; it’s there operating in our RAM, supporting all the other conscious work we’re doing. Perhaps instinct fits in here, or worldviews, or even (how apropos!) ideology.
Perhaps the journey of effective learning goes like this:
unknown unknowns 🠒 known unknowns 🠒 known knowns 🠒 unknown knowns
After all, the more you can take from total ignorance to basically second nature, the more effectively you’ve learned!