The Unknown Unknowns of PPM
Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].
Long after the historical context in which it was uttered has been forgotten, its logical rigor (or lack thereof) will be parsed by undergraduates in philosophy classes, and its rhetoric cited in dictionaries of quotations as the primary--if not uniquely--memorable utterance of its author:
“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.”
-U.S. Department of Defense press briefing, February 12, 2002
Mocked by the U.K. Plain English Campaign in its 2003 Foot in Mouth award, Donald Rumsfeld’s convoluted syntax nevertheless skewers an essential truth that project managers will immediately recognize: all projects are bound by uncertainty, by limitations in the information available to us that inform our understanding of and ability…
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