What do I mean by the Unknown Knowns in Your Business? Well, one of the most common challenges for a start-up is ensuring that there is good communication between teams, as the business grows. But it is difficult to achieve and as people are generally very focussed on their own priorities and often keep their heads down, it can be easy for some information to slip past them.
I saw a good example of this when advising a growing startup several years ago. I was running a series of sessions on marketing best practice. On this particular day, we were discussing the concept and effectiveness of customer personas. The session was being attended, not only by the marketing team, but also by the founder, together with several members from the product and engineering teams.
I explained the principle behind customer personas and the value that they can add. I asked the Head of Marketing if his team had done any work with this technique and invited them to discuss what they knew about their customers. It quickly became clear that they hadn’t addressed this, but they did like the idea. They thought that it would be very useful to build personas of their common customer types and use this to refine the targeting for certain marketing channels.
At this point in the meeting, one of the product team stated that he had already built personas for all of their customers the previous year. He then proceeded to produce copies of his material that neither the founder of the company, nor the marketing team had ever seen. No-one had any idea that this material even existed.
I was thinking about this incident several years later, when I was reading an article about the former US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. In a news briefing in 2002, he famously said:
“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. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.”
He was, of course, talking about terrorism and how hard it can be to build provable connections between the instigators and the political supporters of a specific incident. I remember thinking at the time, that it was a slightly flippant comment. But the more I thought about it over the years, the more I realised that it is very applicable to business, and especially relevant to startups.
Let me explain. To paraphrase what Rumsfeld was saying:
He was talking about different types of information and what we know what we would like to know, but also information we haven’t even thought about yet.
Known Knowns
Things we know we know. This could be any information or data gathered about customer behaviour or research about competitors.
Known Unknowns
Things we know we don’t know. This could be information that we would like to know, but aware we don’t know yet, for example, the attitudes to a new product or service or sales performance of a competitor
Unknown Unknowns
Things we don’t know we don’t know. This could be anything, for example, a new competitor could be about to launch and we have no idea who they are and what impact they might have on our business.
The last one is hard to predict, but could have the most profound impact, especially if you are talking about terrorism, but Unknown Unknowns can also be very problematical for businesses too. For example, how much awareness did companies like Nokia and Motorola have about the upcoming launch of the iPhone and how it would change the core capabilities of the phone.
Based on my example above, we can add a fourth category and my topic for this post
Unknown Knowns in Your Business
Things we don’t know we know. This could be key information that is known by some people in your business but has not been widely shared. This could be research data, or customer feedback for example.
My earlier example about personas describes how one part of a business needed some information and was going to spend time developing it, unaware that this information had already been developed by a team member in a different part of the organization. This is clearly an Unknown Known
Had there been better communication between the different teams, this situation would not have arisen.
I will give you another example, this time from a more mature startup, that I have mentored. I was focussing on working with the founder and the marketing team to help them develop their mission statement goals and key messaging for their service. This business was rapidly growing and had around 100 people working for them in two different locations.
They had already done a good job of developing their key messages and there was some evidence of how it was disseminated around their offices. However, I had spent a couple of days in the business, talking to a lot of people and it became clear that some of the team were aware of the mission statement, but they didn’t really understood it, or understand its relevance to their day to day activity.
I challenged the founder.
“If you ask every member of your team to summarise what this business is about and what the key messages are to a customer, or to a supplier, do you think you would get a consistent answer from the various teams across your business?”
After thinking about it for a few minutes, the answer was “No!”
What we can learn from this is the following:
It’s not enough that a message is communicated, it needs to be understood and applied throughout the business, to every team member in every team. This would bring relevance not only to their own work and their own project, but also to their interactions with suppliers and customers and each other. It creates consistency, fluency and alignment.
In this case, it wasn’t really an Unknown Known but a Misunderstood Known.
Summary
Growth challenges every business to maintain good internal (and external?) communication. Effective communication increases if you improve the interaction between teams and team members across the business. Try to avoid developing silos of teams, unconnected and working in isolation from each other.
Challenging your teams to improve dialogue and collaborate more, can take time and be challenging in itself, but it will produce significant rewards which will help your business grow and develop quickly.
How do we improve communication?
A simple way of doing this is to build social interactions within your business. Regular informal get-togethers are easy to do, but also more focused and inclusive corporate events such as awaydays can build even stronger bonds. They build interpersonal relationships between individuals and teams within your organisation.
In turn, closer relationships will not only ensure a higher quality of communication, but also more open communication channels that stay open long-term. After all, if your employees get along better, they will want to communicate more.
This freeflow of communication will promote a greater understanding of each other’s roles and very quickly, you and your team will enjoy the multitude of benefits that working together better, brings to them and your business. Hopefully that will mean there are not any Unknown Knowns in Your Business.
If anything in this article has struck a chord with you or you can see how your business could benefit from better communication and understanding, why not contact us to see how we can help improve the communication flow in your business.
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~ Dave Mutton, February 2019
