On a Back of an Envelope

Donald Rumsfeld was an American politician and businessman who served as Secretary of Defense in the Gerald Ford and George W. Bush administrations. Although not the originator of the concepts – known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns – he brought this to popular attention.

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.

The ideas are based on the Johari window.  The Johari Window model is a simple and useful tool for illustrating and improving self-awareness, and mutual understanding between individuals within a group. The model is based on a 2 x 2 matrix that compares self and others versus known and unknown knowledge. Created by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955. Luft and Ingham called their Johari Window model ‘Johari’ after combining their first names, Joe and Harry.

For us as project managers, known unknowns refers to risks that we can identify and need to track, and unknown unknowns are those risks which are unforeseeable and which have a habit of blind-siding even the most experienced of us.

Despite being the butt of much humour over the years, Rumsfeld named his autobiography Known and Unknown: A Memoir and in 2013 Errol Morris produced a biographical documentary about Rumsfeld entitled The Unknown Known.

Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke was a German Field Marshal, the chief of staff of the Prussian Army for thirty years. He was instrumental in developing a system for the Prussian military in the 1800s that could deal with the uncertainty of the battlefield and is regarded as the creator of a new, more modern method of directing armies in the field.

Moltke’s famous observation that ‘no plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength’ is more usually represented as,

“no plan survives contact with the enemy”

and is a reminder to every project manager that plans need to take note of changing circumstances.

Moltke’s view was that military strategy had to be understood as a system of options since it was only possible to plan the beginning of a military operation. The main task of a leader was to make extensive preparation of all the possible outcomes which led him to state that,

“Strategy is a system of expedients”

Prussian military strategy in the mid-19^th century was surprisingly modern in outlook. Stephen Bungay in his book, The Art of Action, describes it thus:

‘Mission command is built on three important principles that guide the way leaders direct their people.

• Do not command more than necessary or plan beyond foreseeable circumstances.
• Communicate to every unit as much of the higher intent as is necessary to achieve the purpose.
• Ensure that everyone retains freedom of decision within bounds.’

Modern project management encapsulates these principles in rolling wave planning, empowerment, product variation and project tolerances.

Moltke has another claim to fame having recorded some excerpts from Shakespeare and Goethe on two cylinders on Edison’s newly invented cylinder phonograph in 1889. These are the only known voice recordings from someone born as early as 1800.

To show how relevant Moltke’s famous quotation is in the modern world, we only need to turn to heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson’s streetwise observation,

“Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth”