That’s a headline I didn’t imagine myself writing more than twenty years after the Iraq War. But hey, the world moves in mysterious ways.

Back in 2002, I was a producer at Sky News, with the job of triaging all the video material coming into the building from around the world. Donald Rumsfeld was the US Secretary of Defence, and the question of whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was raging. He gave this answer to a reporter at a news briefing asking about the lack of evidence linking Saddam Hussein’s administration to WMD:

At the time, we in the newsroom, along with many others, gave it a quiet internal snigger. This particular Donald (along with the other one) wasn’t famed for his philosophical acuity.

But this was a just another stop on a long journey for ‘known knowns’, ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’, which started with Socrates and even took in an 8th century scholar from Basra, Iraq (the irony) who made the first dictionary of the Arabic Language.

That journey also passed through the worlds of risk mitigation and project management in the late 20th century and is still a fundamental of the PMO today.

Come with me, though, as I take them into another branch of modern business context - change and resilience.

Change is the only constant, and it feels like it’s accelerating, so it’s never been more important to equip teams and individuals with the ability and capacity to assimilate change without being completely overwhelmed by it.

It turns out that this is a neat way of understanding change and building resilience.

Welcome to the Donald Rumsfeld Matrix:

You can plot change stimuli on the 4 quadrants of a two by two grid, where one axis is Awareness, and the other is predictability.

The four quadrants of change

The Rumsfeld Matrix maps four types of knowledge and uncertainty:

1. Known knowns: [Top right] The things we’re aware of and can predict. These are variables we know about and can predict. So far, so comfortable.

2. Known unknowns: [Bottom right] The things we can’t yet predict, but at least recognise as variables. You can plan for different outcomes from these. Think of a new market, a regulatory change, or a leadership shift.

3. Unknown knowns: [Top left] Predictable variables we haven’t considered yet. Consider them!

4. Unknown unknowns: [Bottom left] The genuine surprises. The “nobody saw that coming” moments. These are the things you have the least control over (the global pandemic and the world’s response to it, for example.)

In fact, I don’t reckon there aren’t many genuinely ‘unknown unknowns’. The UK government planned for a flu pandemic back in 2011. There is scope to seek to know unknown unknowns, and the opportunity to relate them to similar knowns.

In my early career as a newsroom leader, 'unknown unknowns' arrived daily. When the London bombings happened on 7 July 2005, everything changed in minutes. No rehearsals or checklist could fully prepare you for that.

But we did have systems and processes for handling breaking news, as you’d expect. And weirdly, I realised that breaking news stories unfold in similar arcs.

What mattered was composure - the ability to lead calmly through chaos, to act decisively amid uncertainty.

Resilience lives in bridging the gap between what you know and what you don’t

Years later, working in digital transformation, the pattern repeated, just at a different speed. New technologies, shifting consumer habits… lots of unknowns. But the same truth applied: you can’t control every change, but you can control how you respond.

Where some organisations get stuck

Many companies spend 90% of their energy managing 'known knowns' - the things they can measure, report, or optimise.

It feels safe, because it’s visible and knowable, but that’s also where complacency can lurk.

The 'known unknowns' - messy, uncomfortable questions about strategy, customers, or structure - often get pushed aside until they become crises. Important but maybe not urgent.

And the 'unknown knowns' are unknown either because no-one’s seen their relevance to the current change, or because no-one’s connected the dots. The best cure for this is curiosity and expansive thinking, and often results in innovation break-throughs.

A practical lens for leaders

I’ve found the Rumsfeld Matrix to be a simple but transformative coaching tool. When a team is struggling with change, I ask them to map their situation against the four quadrants:

• What do we know we know? (Let’s build confidence there.)

• What do we know we don’t know? (Let’s plan around those uncertainties.)

• What might we not realise we already know? (Let’s unlock latent experience and intuition.)

• And finally, what might be out there that we haven’t even considered? (Let’s stay open.)

• This conversation alone often shifts a team’s mindset from reactive to curious — from being paralysed by change to actively exploring it.

From resistance to agency

Change often feels like something that happens to us - a force we must withstand. But when people start distinguishing between the change they can’t control and the change they can help make happen, they stop being victims of circumstance and start becoming co-authors of transformation.

That’s the essence of resilience: the ability to find agency even when the environment feels uncontrollable.