What you don't know can be high risk and high cost to you personally and to your organization.
The Dangers Of "Unknown Unknowns"
First The BAD News
All of the major project disasters of the past 30 years were overseen or ‘governed’ by otherwise competent executives who did not know what to do or how to act as their project failed.
They were ‘fish out of water’ in the project governance arena. Some even had project backgrounds and still did not know what to do in a ‘governance’ role.
High cost
Billions have had to be written off as a result of failed projects.
Even more billions have been wasted as failing projects are continued until ‘something’ is scrambled over the line and some sort of ‘victory’ is claimed.
Over all of these projects sat business executives who did not know what to do to save their projects and the associated business value. This all-to-common situation is expensive, wasteful and high risk.
When executives and managers are appointed to a project governance role no automatic bestowing of governance knowledge happens. Most executives and managers have a 40-40-20 knowledge of project governance.
- They know 40% of what they need to know.
- They think they know another 40% of what they need to know – but how sure this knowledge is, is not clear and needs to be confirmed or corrected
- And they don’t know 20% of what they need to know. But they don’t know what this ‘unknown unknown’ knowledge is.
High risk
In a project governance role not knowing what you don’t know, and not knowing what you do know that is incorrect, puts your career and reputation at risk.
In Conclusion
Your unknown unknowns are also a great risk to your organization’s future performance as your projects will underperform and not deliver the results desired.
The most common unknown unknowns start at the basics...
