There are always things influencing a system that nobody involved is aware of. Because complex systems are open and endlessly interconnected, some factor shaping the outcome will usually be one nobody had even thought to look for. This is not a sign of poor planning. It is simply a permanent feature of working with anything complex.
This is related to unpredictability, though the emphasis is different. Unpredictability is about not being able to forecast a system precisely, even if you understood every part of it perfectly. Unknowns is a step earlier than that. It is about the fact that some of the factors shaping a system are not yet known to anyone involved at all, not just hard to predict. If you want to look at the forecasting side on its own, we wrote about it separately in Unpredictability: What It Actually Means. This openness is also part of why unknowns are inevitable in the first place, which we wrote about separately in Open System: What It Actually Means.
At the Tribal Health Initiative (THI), a hospital working in the remote Sittilingi valley in Tamil Nadu, the team spent its first decade focused on maternal and infant mortality. Eventually, deaths fell to near zero. Then, in 2003, the whole team walked from village to village, sleeping in people’s homes, and listening to their concerns. What the community told them wasn’t something they had expected. The community did not ask for more health services. Farming and livelihoods were the core problem. This was not something a health-focused organisation had any reason to look for, and the team had no background in farming. But, THI treated it as genuine feedback and went on to learn about farming.
Where You'll See It
The unknowns show up throughout history, science, and everyday life, often in ways far stranger than a missed stakeholder:
Cane toads in Australia. They were brought in during the 1930s to control a beetle damaging sugar cane. Nobody had accounted for the fact that the toads were poisonous to almost every native animal that tried to eat them. They spread across the country and are still a serious problem today.
Penicillin. It was discovered because a stray mould spore landed, by accident, in a laboratory dish that had been left uncovered. Nobody had gone looking for it. It went on to become one of the most important medical discoveries in history.
A group nobody knew about. A new policy or scheme can run into a local network, an informal association, or a power structure that nobody designing the policy even knew existed, and that ends up shaping whether the policy works at all.
The One Thing People Get Wrong About It
It is easy to assume that with a thorough enough stakeholder analysis or risk assessment, every important factor can be identified in advance. Unknowns say something less comfortable. However careful the upfront analysis, something will still turn up that nobody had reason to look for, because it genuinely was not visible from where anyone was standing at the time.
The goal is not to eliminate surprises before they happen. It is to notice them quickly once they do.
Key Takeaways
Expect the unexpected, genuinely. Some factor shaping your work will usually turn out to be something nobody involved had thought to look for, and that is normal, not a sign of poor planning.
Be ready to learn as the system unfolds. It will often only become clear partway through that something completely unanticipated is influencing, or being influenced by, what you are doing.
A single new development can open up much larger effects than expected. A new technology, in particular, can enable a change that ripples out into social effects well beyond what anyone predicted when it was introduced.
The next time an intervention produces an effect nobody saw coming, it might not mean something went wrong in the planning. It might just mean the unknown finally became visible.
Where have you experienced unpredictability in your work? Tell us in the comments!
Related reading: Unpredictability: What It Actually Means · Open System: What It Actually Means