Farewell to Donald Rumsfeld but not his quadrant - because it is SO useful

The death of the former US defence secretary was?announced?yesterday- and that reminded me to dust off a slide I have been using for many years which I called the Rumsfeld Quadrant based on the quotation above which was widely ridiculed by the press at the time. But Donald unlike the Orange Donald was actually talking good sense.?So I have used the quadrant ever since when I found myself training strategists and researchers to explain the different questions you ask of customer data, of quantitative research and qualitative research. You need to know these 4 quadrants. If you only conduct surveys?then all you can find out is what already you know you know, or what you know you don't know.

By far the most interesting and valuable aspects of research is the ability to find out what you didn't know you already knew because your customers or others in your organisation already knew it - and you asked them to tell?you using an open or unstructured answer. That's bottom left. And bottom right is when you find out what you didn't know you didn't know. Every important customer insight, every start up comes out of the bottom right corner. Because typically the market trades on what it already knows and believes to be the case. The new, the upstart, the game changer comes from bottom right. And that is why qualitative methodologies continue to be important. If you are not using those then you are flying blilnd. If you want to discuss this in more detail call me. But you can also see a reference to these different kinds of knowledge in my talk to the APG about the life cycle of an insight which I did years ago and has a couple off thousand views now.?RIP Donald - not someone whose politics I agreed with but his quadrant I would recommend! #Rumsfeld #research #knowledge #unknownunknown #knownknown