US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was right when he suggested that government decision-making could be afflicted by what he called “unknown unknowns”. This is, it now appears, a challenge every manager would be stupid to ignore.
David Dunning, professor of social psychology at America’s Cornell University, and student Justin Kruger have identified a syndrome that has become known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. In essence, this Effect states that our incompetence impairs our ability to recognise our incompetence.
Dunning isn’t saying that all of us are idiots, merely pointing out that Rumsfeld had put his finger on a condition that can delude decision-makers. “The notion of known unknowns really resonates with me,” says Dunning. “And the idea might resonate with a lot of other people if it had come from an engineer or a designer and not Rumsfeld”.
Ignorance, he says, channels everything we do, every decision we make and every solution we devise. Among blithering idiots, ignorance could lead, to take one hilariously extreme example, someone – and yes they were American – to apply for a position at a fast food outlet giving their correct name, address and social security number and then decide to rob the place.
So what can we do? The road to less ignorant decision-making starts with the recognition that there are things we don’t know we don’t know. The next step is to insure against that ignorance by calling on as diverse a range of opinion as possible. But many managers are too busy to do that – and suffer the consequences.
Rumsfeld’s first government job was for Richard Nixon. The Nixon presidency was destroyed by a committee of three middle managers who authorised the robbing of the Watergate hotel. One of the men didn’t think it was a good idea but reasoned: “It’s only a third rate burglary, what could possibly go wrong?”
Remember that before you commit your Watergate.