I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the Question-Driven-Thinking domain, especially given my last six months of effort on Savantica.com. But I would be dishonest if I were to say that this effort has brought renewed interest. Rather I would be inclined to say that it has nearly exhausted my interest. This is not to say that I haven’t added to my toolkit of rules-of-thumb, yet I am not getting any ah-hahs, more like ah-mehs.
I explored the concept of the “default question”, ie the question that is really on people’s minds. In a typical company, the average employee’s default question vacillates between “How will I do in fantasy football?” to “Where will I go for lunch?” to “Am I in trouble?” to “I wonder if she likes me?” I explored the idea that we could begin to effect change in a company by better controlling this default question. But that line of inquiry was trumped by an even more powerful question, “Who the fuck cares?” It was pretty obvious to me that I didn’t give a damn about any company.
Then I found myself interested in the quadrant of Knowledge and Awareness. Very simply, it is the 4 cell matrix created by the intersection of Known-Unknown with Aware-Unaware.
This line of inquiry lead me to the conclusion that “mining” Quadrant II increases productivity while “mining” Quadrant III increases innovation. Strangely, Quadrant I and IV produced a bigger intellectual problem for me, ie what could be said about them? As an example, how can you say anything at all about Quadrant IV? By definition, I don’t even know that it exists. To speak of Quadrant I is like giving a stage introduction to a celebrity that needs no introduction. I don’t want to be that guy. But once again, a background question came crashing to the foreground, “Who the fuck cares?”
This seems to be my current default question, “Who the fuck cares?” It has some colloquial face value as a dismissive term, e.g. somebody presents a topic, concern or question and you can quickly dismiss it with “Who the fuck cares?”. In this usage, there is an operating implication that the word “Who” is really “I” and that this isn’t a question at all but merely a statement of the form “I don’t fucking care”. But I don’t want to be dismissive, I think there is more to the question “Who the fuck cares?” than meets our immediate awareness. I am here to hypothesize that “Who the fuck cares?” is actually the intersection point in the very middle of the quadrant where all the cells meet!
To prove this hypothesis, I must show that “Who the fuck cares?” is a question that is, at once, both in our awareness and not in our awareness and is also simultaneously, both known and unknown. I believe that I can also prove that if the question has been answered and it has been proven that “Somebody cares” then we are solidly outside of the intersection and sitting squarely in one of the four quadrants. I have no idea where this is going, which makes it interesting to me to the extent that I know I am not operating wholly in the domain of Quadrant I.
Let’s have a quick look back on Slavoj Zizek’s decomposition of the Donald Rumsfeld Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction speech. You may remember Rumsfeld saying, There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. All of this was spoken to make us “Give a Fuck” about attacking Iraq. But once Zizek pointed out that Quadrant II was missing from this analysis, ie the Collective Unconscious, ie the knowledge which isn’t aware of itself, then the door was open to become aware of what that knowledge was. And it was classic Freudian unconscious stuff – it was pure rage! We were being driven by our own rage. Once I personally realized I wanted to attack Iraq because I was angry, guess what, I didn’t give a fuck anymore. This shows how completing the square opens the question “Who the fuck cares?” while conversely, if the square is incomplete then somebody probably does “Give a fuck”.
This example falls short of complete proof but it is an instructive anecdote and provides me with enough intuitive insight to arrive back at the question, “Who the fuck cares?”
Inside Passage Outside Passage 