This blog is not in the habit of giving publicity to shilly-shallying liberals, but today I’m making an exception for well-known hippy Donald Rumsfeld.
Below is something the old beatnik said at a press conference a few years ago. You may need to read it a couple of times, but it’s worth it:
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, 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.
Rummy got some stick for this at the time, mostly because he was speaking in the larger context of that well-known triumph of customer relationship management, the invasion of Iraq. The ridicule wasn’t entirely fair, as he has said much dumber things, and if you ignore all the ‘knowns’ and ‘unknowns’ sounding a bit funny (and the fact that Rumsfeld just looks a bit funny - kind of like J.R. Ewing right after he was shot) what you have is a very intelligent piece of analysis, and one that is bitingly true of all sorts of situations that entrepreneurs and SMEs find themselves in.
Take my friend Kevin, who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
Kevin (I’ve changed his name) has a lot going for him: he’s very bright, good-looking and likeable. He has drive. After a successful few years in the media, he’s now got a great idea for an online business, one that could potentially earn him a good income. The problem is, he doesn’t know where to start. He knows that he wants an interactive web service, but he doesn’t know what expertise he needs.
I - and quite possibly you - could tell him that he should learn or at least understand the purpose of simple technologies like HTML and CSS, before moving on to more complex stuff like PHP and Ajax. He needs to understand what a content management system is, why he’s probably going to need one, and that they can be had for free. He’s going to need to get an account with a webhost and make judgements about when to switch to dedicated hosting as his site takes off, as I’m sure it will. He has to grasp that the technologies he uses to run his site must marry with the software installed on his server. And that’s just the technology side. Let’s not even get him started on usability, SEO, PPC, social media marketing and the rest.
But, by himself, he doesn’t know what he needs to learn. And you know what? It’s not easy to find out. Kev knows that there are technologies out there that he needs to know about (he has, to skip back to Rummyworld, known unknown unknowns) but has no idea where to start looking for information on them, and in what order they should be approached.
For Kev, the solution is relatively simple. He’s got lots of mates who do understand this stuff, and we’re more than happy to help him out. Alternatively, he could partner with a tech expert - providing he can find one he is happy to work with - or, the brute force option, take a large amount of time out to simply learn the stuff himself from the bottom up.
A lot of SMEs I come across don’t have friends like Kevin’s, and they certainly don’t have a ton of time. I know a successful and profitable small company that operates in an environment, related to the construction industry, which has allowed it to be very traditional and stay waaaay behind the times in terms of tech and communications. The Managing Director knows he needs a better website than the out-of-a-box AOL homepage he’s used for five years, but he doesn’t have too many ideas how to go about getting one. He doesn’t know what a server is, is a bit hazy on how to use a browser and is generally sub-Rumsfeldian when it comes to any technology unrelated to shifting large piles of gravel around.
What does he do? He calls me. Why? Because I worked on a company brochure for him a couple of years ago, and he remembered I was an all right sort of bloke who knew at least something about the internet. I’m able to point him in the right direction.
Some SMEs never get pointed in the right direction, leading to all kinds of screwups, missed opportunities and overinflated invoices from gurning charlatans. And, of course, to trainwreck websites.
What are these guys supposed to do? The knowledge divide in the business community is becoming more marked. On the one side we have:
- People who have known knowns - they know what web technologies can do, and they know how to make them do it.
- People who have known unknowns - who are like me. Although they might be a bit weak when it comes to setting up a server or coding in PHP, they know that these technologies are available and where they might fit in a project.
And on the other:
- People with unknown unknowns, who may have a reasonable idea of what they want their business to achieve online, but no idea how to go about achieving it.
Those of us in the first group spend so much of our time in internet la-la land that we sometimes don’t realise that the second group is a long way behind. We tend to dismiss them as old (which they are not, necessarily) and out of touch, when in truth they are often full of vitality and ideas, and brilliant in their own fields of expertise. But unless the members of that second group take time out to educate themselves, their only option is to throw money at their online problems and hire web firms to handle everything. They can use all kinds of traditional mechanisms (referrals and the like) to make sure they work with someone who at least has a good reputation. But how do they know if their provider is right for them, or delivering best value?
They don’t, usually. There’s a big opportunity here, and plenty of folks are having a go at exploiting it. I’m just not sure that anyone’s got it right yet, at least in a way that delivers reliable value to the unknowing unknowers.
