The Fourth Quadrant of Knowledge

Summary

The Fourth Quadrant of Knowledge I was first introduced to the concept of “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” in a sort of pseudo-group therapy practice in the ’90s. A decade or so later, the idea broke into the public imagination with “There are unknown unknowns”, and while the idea has been around a while, it doesn’t seem to have a name. I call it the knowledge quadrant. The idea is that, well, there are things you know, and things you don’t know. And you can further break down the things you don’t know into things you know you don’t know and things you don’t know you don’t know and this is useful in strategic planning and psychology and probably elsewhere as well. Sometime in the previous decade the idea resurfaced to me while doing user interface design work for Subject-matter experts, because the idea as I’ve always heard it described is incompelete. There are things you know. Great, OK, we can move on now right? The things we know are boring, let’s talk about the things we don’t know, those are interesting. We’re putting a lot of work onto the word know, so I’m going to use aware to indicate the second concept in this: There are things you’re aware you don’t know, and things of which you’re unaware you don’t know. Extending this to the other half of know, well, there are things you’re aware you know, and then there are the things you’re unaware that you know, which I don’t often hear people talk about, probably because the idea seems a bit unsettling. There is space for a book that hasn’t been written yet, Zen and the Art of User Interface Design, which would heavily emphasize the idea and importance of Beginner’s Mind. I was introduced to the concept through the same pseudo-group therapy work as the knowledge classification matrix referenced above. Applied to meditation, the idea is approaching Zen meditation as if for the first time, without any preconceptions and accepting the impermanence of things and I have found repeatedly through my work that for a...