Unknown Unknowns: Why Uncertainty Isn't the Problem
"…there are known knowns; there are things we know we 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."
— Donald Rumsfeld, 2002
Rumsfeld was talking about military intelligence. But he could just as easily have been describing the average strategic planning cycle.
We've built an unhealthy relationship with not knowing
Somewhere along the way, uncertainty became something to fix rather than something to navigate.
We track, optimise, and forecast with increasing sophistication, and yet the things that actually derail organisations are almost never the things we were measuring. They're the unknown unknowns: the pandemic, the platform transformation, the competitor pivot that seemed to come from nowhere. Not because the signals weren't there, but because we weren't imagining expansively, weren’t mapping out unexpected consequences.
The framework itself is older than Rumsfeld. We can trace it back through 1960s NASA and Lockheed engineers to Aristotle and ancient proverbs across cultures. The reason it keeps resurfacing is that it describes something permanent about the human condition: we are always making decisions without complete information. That has never been otherwise. The question is whether we've built the instincts to work with that reality, or against it.
Complexity is not the exception. It's the baseline.
For most organisations, unknown unknowns aren't dramatic black swan events. They're the accumulated weight of high complexity — too many interdependencies, too much noise, too many people pulling in subtly different directions. All the dials turned up at once.
The problem is that we tend to treat complexity as an aberration i.e. something that appeared because of a restructure, a market shift, a difficult quarter. Something that will resolve itself once things settle down.
They won't. Complexity is a product of people and uncertainty, and both are permanent features of any organisation worth working in. It exists on a continuum, not as a binary state. The organisations that navigate it well aren't the ones that eliminate it. But they are the ones that stop pretending it isn't there.
Navigating the unknown: three principles
Accepting complexity is the first step, the second is knowing how to work through it.
Develop and trust your instincts
When there's too much information to process and not enough comprehension to plan, the instinct is usually to gather more data. But more data rarely resolves genuine uncertainty, instead it just compounds it. The more useful discipline is learning to identify the signals you're already picking up that others are missing. Intuition, in this context, isn't a soft skill, it's a strategic one, built through attention and practice over time.
Anchor to purpose before anything else
When everything is moving at once, purpose is what keeps a team oriented. Not a values statement but a clear, shared articulation of what success actually looks like and why it matters. Without that, any direction feels equally valid (or equally risky), which is how organisations end up paralysed precisely when they need to act.
Simplify before you solve
The instinct under pressure is to add: more process, more workstreams, more contingencies. The more effective move is almost always to strip back. What is the one thing that actually matters right now? What is the single most important change to make? Complexity doesn't get resolved by adding more complexity on top of it.
Map what you know. Then find the gaps.
Systems thinking offers a practical entry point when the blank page feels overwhelming so start by mapping what you do know.
The act of drawing out — physically, on paper — the system as you currently understand it makes two things visible at once: where the knowledge is, and where the gaps are. Those gaps aren't a problem to be embarrassed by. They're the questions that tell you who to talk to next, what to investigate, and where the real complexity lives.
From there, the work becomes collaborative. Bringing in other perspectives on the same system: people who map it differently, who see different edges and interdependencies, is how unknown unknowns start to become known unknowns. You don't solve for them immediately. You make them visible. That's already progress.
From unknown to known: the role of curious discovery
It is the act of curious discovery and co-creation that helps us navigate the very normal, very eternal complexities of the unknown.
The problem is that when chaos is coming from every direction, most teams can't access that instinct. The pressure to have answers — to appear in control, to protect existing direction — closes down the very curiosity that would help. Organisations go smaller precisely when they need to go wider.
That's exactly what nouvôt is created for. Not to arrive with the answers, but to design the conditions where a team can find their own answers and leave with the conviction to act on them.