Betting on Unknown Unknowns

But it’s only when we sacrifice the certainty of answers, when we take our training wheels off, and when we dare to wander away from the street lamps that breakthroughs happen. If you stick to the familiar, you won’t find the unexpected. Those who get ahead in this century will dance with the great unknown and find danger, rather than comfort, in t

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The connoisseurs of uncertainty know that an experiment with a known outcome is not an experiment at all and that revisiting the same answers is not progress. If we explore only well-trodden paths, if we avoid games we don’t know how to play, we’ll remain stagnant. Only when you’re dancing in the dark, only when you don’t know where the light switc

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Embrace ambiguity. Anomalies usually don’t point to obvious actions. They fall into gaps that are not well explained by current models, and the data supporting them may not be clear-cut. Established businesses often have difficulty embracing this kind of ambiguity, as is demonstrated by the adage “What gets measured gets managed.”

But ambiguity crea... See more

These being tail risks, there are countless definitionally unimaginable things that might happen. Perhaps the next global crisis won’t be such a boon for innovation. Unknown unknowns abound.