"Unknown unknowns"

When asked about the lack of evidence linking Iraq and so-called "weapons of mass destruction" during a press briefing on February 12, 2002, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, "Reports that say something hasn't always 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 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 tends to be the difficult ones."

While Rumsfeld certainly did not invent the concept (his quote actually reminds me of the famous Johari Window, created by the psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham to help leaders better understand their blind spots - note that "Johari" is an amalgamation of their two names), it became his most famous line, which he used in the title of his memoir Known and Unknown.  The director Errol Morris used the quotation for the title of his documentary on Donald Rumsfeld, "Unknown Known".  Mikael Krogerus adapted this quotation and subsequently referred to something he called the "Rumsfeld Matrix" in The Decision Book:

While I was familiar with the quote and knew of the matrix, I was surprised to find a tangential reference to both in a publication while searching for something called a "fundamental surprise".  Here, rather than depicting the concept as a matrix, they used a Venn diagram and slightly changed the classification by completely eliminating the category of "unknown knowns" and including "fundamental surprises" as a special subset of "Unknown unknowns".  The investigators were studying the impact of "fundamental surprises" on errors made during the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in 2011.  

The term "fundamental surprise" was first used by Zvi Lanir at the Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1983 in reference to the Yom Kippur War.  Lanir defined “fundamental surprise” as a surprising (unexpected) event which reveals an often profound discrepancy between one's perception of the world and the reality.  In regards to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, the operators at the nuclear power plant never envisioned the chain of events that would lead to a partial nuclear meltdown and radiation leak.  The region experienced a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, which caused a tsunami.  The tsunami caused a flood, and the flood damaged the emergency generators that were critical to the reactor's cooling systems.  The loss of power to the cooling systems led to the meltdown.  The plant's operators never envisioned this kind of event.  In fact, the plant's safety design was never designed to deal with this kind of crisis.  When they were faced with the crisis, they were paralyzed by the reality of the situation.

Interestingly enough, there was a second, perhaps less well known, nuclear power plant impacted by the 2011 earthquake in the Fukushima region of Japan.  Ranjay Gulati, Charles Casto, and Charlotte Krontiris published an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review that compares and contrasts the experience at the Fukushima Daiichi plant and its sister plant, the Fukushima Daini plant.  While the aftermath of the earthquake led to a partial nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the Fukushima Daini plant was back under control within 2 days of the earthquake, and the reactors were safely shut down. 

Gulati, Casto, and Krontiris (and others) suggest that the key difference between the two plants was leadership.  As they write, "A crisis disrupts the familiar.  When past experience doesn't explain the current condition, we must revise our interpretation of events and our response to them."  While there is no question that the damage sustained at the Daiichi plant were more severe, the leaders at the Daini plant simply responded better by acting decisively, stepping back when necessary to make sense of the rapidly evolving situation, and responding to shifting realities.  "In the heat of the crisis, problem by problem, they acted their way toward sense, purpose, and resolution."

I am reminded of a similar situation where the differences in how leaders responded to two very similar crises significantly altered the outcome.  As told in the book Island of the Lost by Joan Druett and my blog post "A tale of two leaders", two ships wrecked off the coast of the Auckland Islands in 1864.  The crew of the Grafton fared much better than the crew of the Invercauld, and again, the key difference was leadership.  As Florence Williams writes in her New York Times book review of the book, "Their divergent experiences provide a riveting study of the extremes of human nature and the effects of good (and bad) leadership."

Leadership matters, particularly during a crisis.  The best leaders are not paralyzed by the "unknown unknowns" and the "fundamental surprises".  As the Canadian writer Robin Sharma said, "Anyone can lead when the plan is working.  The best lead when the plan falls apart."