6 Comments
User's avatar
Alpha University Fellowship's avatar

Respectfully, this has been around long before Rumsfeld. I was first introduced to this quote in the 90's through Landmark education as part of their curriculum, but I am sure they go it from somewhere else.

Robert Emmett Dolan's avatar

Agree!

This matrix was part of an IBM presentation that I attended in the’90s.

Exoreality's avatar

CHECK OUT my piece out this morning on the Rumsfeld Problems in mathematics.

Cosmo P DeStefano's avatar

Self-awareness is crucial. We need to understand and explore the outer edge of the border where our knowledge ends and our ignorance begins.

Design to Scale's avatar

Nice to see an example and not just an another explanation.

“Typically we skip the step of identifying what we don’t know and focus only on what we explicitly do know…” That’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

See my recent post for related matrices like the Johari Window, and a 3D matrix.

Richard Careaga's avatar

The fourth quadrant is the most dangerously from a legal standpoint. It’s called “constructive notice,” facts you are presumed to have been aware of and acted on. It’s particularly pernicious in the context of organizational email archives with their discovery treasure trove of unread emails.