[October 17, 2026] Unpredictable events, good or bad, hit people, organizations, and whole societies harder than anyone planned for. After the fact, someone always calls the outcome destiny. That is hindsight talking. We cannot predict these events. But we can build habits and systems that let us absorb the bad ones and use the good ones.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb called them Black Swans. A Black Swan event comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is then explained as if it had been obvious all along. Donald Rumsfeld was making the same point years before Taleb’s 2007 book.
Rumsfeld sorted what people know into three bins. There are things we know we know. There are things we know we do not know. And there are things we do not know we do not know. He called that last bin the unknown unknowns. We only see them after they have already arrived.
The lesson is simple. Do not spend your life trying to name the next surprise. Build yourself so that you can take a hit and still function, and can move when a break goes its way. We should assume the gap in knowledge is real. The surprise is not a failure of imagination that you can close by sitting in your easy chair and relaxing. It is a standing condition.
What helps is connecting the dots once the event is in front of you. That takes knowledge already on hand, and enough flexibility to drop a plan that no longer fits that particular situation.
Four practices matter:
First, keep people around you who are pushed to think past the usual answer. Give them problems that have not been solved before, and give them time to work on a method that is not already in the book. You cannot rehearse the unknown. You can have tested people ready when it shows up.
Second, keep current information organized and within reach and others close to you. Organized does not mean more. A pile of unread information is not knowledge. It is noise, and noise slows the very decision you need.
Third, do not run yourself from a fixed picture of how the world works. A plan, a policy, or a standing procedure can be current and still be useless. Most of them rest on assumptions. When the assumption is wrong, your procedure sends you down the wrong road with confidence.
Fourth, when the unknown unknown hits, do not open with a search for who is at fault. Blame feels like action. It burns time you do not have. There will be a place later to sort out what failed and who owns it. The first job is to see the event clearly and act.
Good people have to stay nimble. That comes from those who are allowed to speak plainly, and from someone who will hear it. Open talk will not tell you what the Black Swan will be. It will tell you, faster than an event ever will, what the event means and what you can still do about it.
————
Please read my books:
A name from the past, Donald Rumsfeld, the Sec of Defense under President Bush during the Iraq War. He was one of the better men in that position, despite the attacks on him by crazy Democrats.
Army Capt, thanks for bringing up Donald Rumsfeld. He is the one who made the idea of “unknown unknowns” well known during the Iraq War. That idea means there are things we do not even realize we do not know about. Leaders cannot predict every surprise, but they can build teams and habits that help them deal with shocks when they come. That is still useful advice today, no matter what people thought of Rumsfeld at the time.
He was DA MAN ….. SECDEF Donald Rumsfeld, good man. Great leadership advice today on how to handle surprises in any walk of life.