Black swans as unknown unknowns in the matrix

After designing the Johari window, a business in matrixing evolves…

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Joe: We’re on to something with these matrix ideas. Remember Eisenhower asked us to fix him up with one for prioritization?

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Harry: And Rumsfeld just called. He wants to clarify combinations between known and unknown variables.

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Joe: Easy. Known-knowns like increases in world population. Known-unknowns like the earthquakes. Unknown-knowns like revolutions. And Unknown-unknowns.

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Harry: How can you know what unknown-unknowns are?

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Joe: They’re the black swans coming out of nowhere. The good like the internet. The bad like 9/11.

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Voice-over

Prime matrices: four, nine, sixteen boxes and so on. But the neatest and easiest to grasp are the fours.

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Outliers Lurk Before They Leap

Enter the black swan

At ballet rehearsal:

Director: Everything is going smoothly, the four cygnets do their triddle-traddle across the stage, nice contrast with da-dah! Entrance of you as Odile, the black swan.

Svetlana: Very metaphorical.

Director: The black swan was already a metaphor for the unexpected event caused by an outlier. Tchaikovsky put it in his ballet, and Joseph Schumpeter may have been thinking “black swan” when he proposed “creative destruction.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb extended it to history, science, finance and technology and then Clayton Christensen called it by another name, “disruptive innovation” referring mainly to technology.

Svetlana: So the story of Swan Lake is a metaphor for business?

Director: Not yet, but someone’s bound to latch onto it.

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Voice-over

For a short film on "Disruptive Innovation" go here

http://youtu.be/itEn46Pcq_Y

What more can we say?

Art foreshadows science. 
Outliers lurk before they leap.