March 20, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Checking for Sources of "Unk-Unks"
Donald Rumsfeld was ridiculed for his famous "known unknowns" remark, then defended as Kantian and clear. Interestingly, I have seen no media coverage reveal he was simply quoting accepted project/process management theory going back to Chapman and Ward's 1997 textbook on Project Management and subsequent works.
Now I have just come across an article (also acknowledging a debt to Chapman and Ward) published a few months prior to the Defense Secretary's remarks that bears a very strong resemblance to the Secretary's phrasing.
Managing Project Uncertainty: From Variation to Chaos, by Arnoud De Meyer, Christopher H. Loch and Michael T. Pich. MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter 2002.
What Uncertainty Looks LikeVariation
Variation comes from many small influences and
yields a range of values on a particular activity..Foreseen Uncertainty
Foreseen uncertainties are identifiable and
understood influences that the team cannot be sure will occur....Unforeseen Uncertainty
As its name suggests, unforeseen uncertainty
can’t be identified during project planning. There is no
Plan B. The team either is unaware of the event’s possibility or
considers it unlikely and doesn’t bother creating contingencies.
“Unknown unknowns,” or “unk-unks,” as they are sometimes
called, make people uncomfortable because existing decision
tools do not address them. Unforeseen uncertainty is not always
caused by spectacular out-of-the-blue events, however. It also
can arise from the unanticipated interaction of many events,
each of which might, in principle, be foreseeable. Unforeseen
uncertainty occurs in any project that pushes a technology envelope
or enters a new or partially known market. Pfizer’s blockbuster
drug Viagra, for instance, began as a heart medication to
improve blood flow by relaxing the arteries.When clinical studies
found that it also increased sexual performance, the company
ended up developing that unexpected side effect into a blockbuster
drug, implementing new clinical development and a new
marketing approach midway through the original project.Chaos
Whereas projects subject to unforeseen uncertainty start
out with reasonably stable assumptions and goals, projects subject
to chaos do not. Even the basic structure of the project plan
is uncertain, as is the case when technology is in upheaval or
when research, not development, is the main goal. Often the
project ends up with final results that are completely different
from the project’s original intent.
The hazards of entering this difficult terrain before the press are duly noted.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at March 20, 2004 9:06 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links'unknown-unknowns' is an old aerospace industry term. One would think that reporters who had been covering the defense beat for years would have been familiar with it..
As the the director of worldwide sales of a small high-tech company I can attest to the validity of the list in its totality.
My small company runs the gamut from R & D to Software development, sourcing, outsourcing, production, assembly, Sales, Marketing, Shipping, Techsupport etc,etc,etc. I get to see it all with a world wide prospective.
The knowledge that the guy running the defense department understands how the world really works allows me to sleep soundly each night.
Thank God that reporters are not in charge of running things, they seem to be so cluless.
Isn't interesting how there seems to be an increasing drumbeat of "reporters" being outed for fabrication of "news" and "interviews"?
Let the house cleaning begin!
No more Jayson Blairs or Walter Durantys. Liars should not work for the press.
The press operates like middle school. Ridicule is applied to people who are either smarter or stupider or taller or shorter or thinner or fatter or richer or poorer than you are. Everyone and everything is ridiculed to disguise the fact that you are a 12 or 13 year old kid in a world that you do not understand and cannot control. It is bad enough to hear this kind of stuff from your children -- eventually they will grow out of it. But listening to grown men spout off like kids is more than I can bear.
I am in business and I knew what Rumsfeld was talking about without ever reading the Chapman and Ward textbook.
Of course, American business people are more sophisticated and nuanced than reporters and Europeans.
The known/unknown analysis approach is decades old, certainly in aerospace / defense industries which pretty much require the most sophisticated and explicit project management techniques of any sector due to the complexity of the engineering and systems challenges they must address.
Been there, managed that in both defense and commercial development projects .....
Every reporter "knows" that Rumsfield, as a Republican, must be ridiculed at every opportunity. It's part of the job description.
Whether the expression made sense or not is completely irrelevant to the exercise.
Remember in 1992 when Bush I went to a convention and the pool cameraman recorded him expressing surprise during a conversation about a grocery scanner? The NY Times reporter eagerly asked the pool reporters if Bush was surprised because he had never seen a scanner. The pool guys said no. His surprise came over something else that the technician said. The Times guy didn't care what the truth was. He had a story that made Bush look out of touch and the fact that it was a complete lie didn't matter. It helped a democrat win. So he wrote the story and the rest of the media ran with it.
It's all about helping their guys win.
I second rkb. My Dad is an EE and he's used this useage for decades (what you know you know, what you think you know, what you don't know you don't know). The Newspapers' surprising response to Rumsfeld's remarks made me think, "These guys don't know this?!".
It made me wonder about the rest of what I read/hear in the media. Can any of them be trusted to report reality with any accuracy?
guess what; most of the media are ignorant liberal arts grads who took journalism!!! and think that they can understand the world
they couldn't pass math or physics or economics or... but they can do comparative literature (hint its all the fault of evil white men) and protest
even forbes, fortune and WSJ are pretty useless most of the time... but at least they try
of course journalists with chicago mbas are owrth their weight in gold, no matter what they took at undergrad!
Given the media's obsession with Rumsfeld's verbal pratfalls and scatology...he may want to keep a bag of monkey kibble handy.
When Rummy speaks to the ignorant public via the ignorant journalist he should not use obscure professional jargon. To communicate one's message in an simple, understandable manner is something a politician should be able to do.
Funny I dont remember the media going off on rummy about this.I seem to remember them giving him a free pass like they usually do.When you refer to the media being morons are you refering to those at faux news too because I see them toting the parties water in every circumstance they can find.Is this what you require for a free press to operate in?Why is it that the press should'nt ask a few questions that are relevant?That being said,I dont see the media asking enough questions.For instance;why is it that all the relevant questions about the case for war are just now being asked in light of the tell all books comming out and making the pertinant questions viabale?
When we have a television press corp that wont deliver any kind of investigative stories,but rely on those so called debates we all lose something called democracy.When we call the national press corp "liberal" we lose their ability to cover stories abjectivly.There should be no influence of partisanship in journalism and yet we see an overwhelming majority taking Whitehouse press releases and rewriting them into articles without fact checking.If you call that liberalism.I fear for the future of our press corp.I would instead call it yellow journalism.And again I fear for our journalism corp.
Sorry, Jacob--this wasn't "obscure professional jargon", I found it intuitively obvious the moment I heard it (and I'm not a scientist, I studied music and then switched and got my degree in Classics!)
Sheesh. I'm going to give some references, but I fear I will once again prove you can't argue with 'Abjectivists'!
As for ridicule, in addition to the 'foot in mouth' award above, try these:
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1761585
http://www.ucfreepress.com/ac-unknowns.shtml
http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/12-1-2003-48150.asp
http://www.hellblazer.com/archives/002638.html
http://www.dawn.com/2002/06/07/int3.htm
In defense see:
http://www.johnquiggin.com/archives/001321.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/12/09/do0902.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/12/09/ixportal.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=173099
Paul McCartney loves to talk about his songwriting process (stay with me, this is relevant). I remember when he talked about the songs on Flaming Pie, which was sort of a Beatles tribute. He mentioned two lyrics that made no sense, but which nevertheless were intelligible on some level. Lyric 1: "I don't care what you want of me, I go back so far I'm in front of me." Lyric 2: "Hey Jude, you'll do, the movement you need is on your shoulders."
Now if Paul McCartney can get away with affirming that there is meaning in what are obviously not well formed statements, I think we can cut Mr. Rumsfeld some slack in uttering a perfectly well formed statement that certain members of popular culture was just too stupid or unimaginative to understand.
Count this as another blow to the myth that it is leftists who are "nuanced" and "intellectual." I think they confuse self-importance and haughtiness with being elevated, and it's getting really annoying.
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