During an interview with Carrie Sharpe, a couples communications consultant, we were talking about what a couple can talk about to prepare for the arrival of a child.
Carrie has five children, and is a beautiful, sane woman. For this obvious reason and many others, she is a world-class expert on parenting.
She raised the point that there are so many things you can’t plan for.
Boy, is that true.
There are so many, overwhelmingly many, things you can’t predict. You can’t plan for the flu. You cant plan for premature birth, to name a few.
I know I can be paralyzed when I think about it. All the things that will go wrong!
And my way of snapping out of it is to take care of what I *can* predict. There are a lot of things that are predictable.
So, in the corporate stategy language, all those unpredictable things are the known unknowns. We KNOW crazy will happen, but we don’t know when or where.
The Known Knowns, those are the stuff we know we know. That’s comforting. I know baby will arrive. I know I can’t work when baby arrives.
Let’s start the plan around that. And then when the crazy hits, I’ll have more room to handle it because the other things are handled.