I saved the best for last. Unless I come up with some juicy press briefings, this is the last Rumsfeld poem. This poem is so relevant to what I do for a living (one part of which involves investigating the unknown) that it is the first page in my manual. If you work for me, it's required reading.The Unknown
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.
---o0o---
Department of Defense news briefing Feb. 12, 2002
2 comments:
Yeah, that's the one. The unknown unknowns will get you every time.
Frequently the known unknowns too, but at least you have a heads-up about those.
And if you work at Microsoft, the known knowns will get you. They call them "known issues" and they say it like YOU should have known about the issue.
Yeah, it's always the unknown unknowns that you should have known. You're right -- with known unknowns at least you can form some sort of plan for knowing.
And then sometimes you get the blame for those known issues, even though the other party deliberately chose to ignore them but flag them as known.
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