Saturday Morning Rant: Attack of the Unknown Unknown

It’s been a rough couple of weeks.  Lost resources to other projects, locked my keys in my car, had to walk home in the rain, 4 hours of commuting time on the metro in a 24 hour period, got caught in a rumor mill, yadda yadda yadda.

I can see the future and its full of...unknown...unknowns.

Ok so what I want to talk about is Don Rumsfeld, again, because he’s the one who talked about the unknown unknowns.  Remember that?  He caught a lot of flack and I thought he was just making excuses for really poor decisions at the time.

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.”

Sounds like BS.     But, and this is my life’s theme that past few weeks,  you can’t really understand what the heck this little bit of truth means until you’ve actually live through an appearance of the unknown unknown.

The problem with the unknown unknown is that there is nothing you can do.   They will just slap you upside the head one day.    I mean, PMs are like psychics, we like telling and planning for the future, and  we say “this is going to happen, and then that’s going to happen.  And this is going to happen, and then that’s going to happen.”

And then we plan for the known unknowns and we call them ‘risks’ and we say “ok, just in case this one shows up with do that.  And if this one shows up we’ll do this. And if that one shows up we’ll do that.”

But what about the unknown unknowns?    Is the unknown unknown not the nature of the universe?   Chaos theory says the natural state of the universe has origins that appears chaotic but eventually out of which order appears.  So we may assume that we have some type of ordering of activities, and they may get done. But are we ultimately fighting against a force that implies chaos and diversity and growth and reorganization according to its own source, for which we are completely unaware?

And not only that, when these unknown unknown appears, quantum physics says that how we observe things affects how they appear; how they manifest themselves into physical reality.  So my realization to this unknown unknown that appears chaotically in the environment is going to be completely different to yours.    That will affect the behavior or manifestation of the unknown unknown.   Paradoxically, our mixing of perceptions is going to clash and cause conflict which will cause more chaos.  It’s like a thousand rubber balls in motion in a racquetball court…try tracking one of them.

Just Calm Down! I have it ALL under control!

My initial thought is, ya can’t control for that.

Ya just kind of have to go “there are going to be times when the unknown unknown appears. And it will appear chaotic and it will cause conflict, and what you are going to do is…….learn.”

And what you are going to put on the risk log is ‘the laws of the universe are going to affect my project at some point.’

And this has been my lesson this week.  Let me tell you, because there were unknown unknown that came up for which I had a completely different observation than my powers that be, for which I had a completely different reaction than my powers that be, and for which, ya know….I’ve learned.

I can’t go into detail, cause It’s classified and I’d have to kill you, but it has not been easy.  My bad. I made some mistakes.  I apologized for them.

But still…really? How can I account for the fly ball from left field, the chaotic hit ya upside the head, the diversity of observation of the same phenomena?

Finally it makes me think about the team formation cycle; Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing.  I think there’s some fundamental truth in that cycle.  Because from forming you go straight to storming, and that’s because you hit the unknown unknowns every single time.

Just my Saturday Morning Rant.