For a brief period, while I was an analyst, I worked for a General who was inclined to say, “tell me what you know, tell me what you think you know, and tell me what you don’t know”. Of course he missed a category of information. It was what we later came to call the ”unknown unknown”. Nicholas Taleb refers to this category of information as silent evidence. It is the vast body of information that we are not aware of, and even worse, are not aware that we are not aware of it.

Does this matter to the NGO security analyst? Of course! If we fail to acknowledge the existence of silent evidence we fool ourselves into believing we know the world better than we really do. We track incidents and develop models to try and predict the future without thought to how incomplete our models are. Worse, if we are naïve enough to believe our models we unknowingly leave ourselves exposed to future unknown risks.

Lesson Learned: I don’t know as much as I think I do. No matter how much information I have the vast bulk of it, the hidden silent evidence, remains below the surface. From this morass of unseen circumstance can spring forth all manner of unanticipated surprises.

Tags: risk, Black Swan