I’m learning to crab walk. I decided to try something new to combat my reduced physical activity that began with working from home a few years ago. I chose an exercise program that includes a lot of familiar activity, and a little bit of unfamiliar activity. Most of the unfamiliar activity came naturally to me, but the crab walk seemed to break my brain at first. I am eternally grateful I was doing this alone, because I must have looked hilarious the first couple of times. I think that what happened is that somehow my life had created very little embodied knowledge that could turn up for me in this movement. Unlike playing with a new-to-me analog synthesizer, which had reminded my hands of my piano. Unlike learning to longboard, which had reminded my legs of snowboarding. But seemingly crabwalking reminded my body of nothing.

I found myself connecting this to some of my worries of late. As the geopolitical contexts of our lives are changing drastically and rapidly right now, I’ve been worrying that the approaches we’ve been taking toward our relationships and communities and visions of shared healthy peace will not be enough.

You may be wondering how I was connecting that to the crab walk! I can explain, in two parts.

The first part is about the amount of unconscious ability and knowledge that we rely on all the time to get things done. Maybe at some point you’ve done that exercise about how you get to your grocery store: all the things the body does between your home and the store, and how little awareness you have of most of them. Or there may be a friend you are good at supporting when they worry, but you might not be aware of everything you are doing that is helpful to them. So much of our lives is not experienced with awareness of “thinking”.

Here is the second part: when I worried about whether we collectively have what it will take to keep each other safer than we have done, especially now in the face of current trends, it was within my admiration for the many and varied efforts underway, some of them already longrunning projects. Think of every movement or organized effort towards justice and change that you can. So many people, strategies, actions. I wondered: if all of that will not be enough, then what about Very Different Nearly Unimaginable Unprecedented things? Is anything like that possible, and where would it come from?

I thought of the weird feeling of crab walking, and the “when the scissors start to glide” feeling of knowing, strangely, a little about how to proceed with something you haven’t done before. What’s called “tacit” and “procedural” knowledge. You may be familiar with related ideas from the Johari Window (unknown quadrant), or the Awareness UnderstandingMatrix (unknown knowns). I thought about ancient story archetypes of “discovering special powers”.

A practical example: communication overload!

Some of the work Brook and I do with groups involves surfacing “unknown knowns”, usually in order to address the “known knowns” (concerns that the group contacted us about). To use a simple example, a geographically dispersed group has a concern around the number of platforms they communicate through. This “known known” could lead us to explore the platforms with them – which ones they are using, and how, for what – in hopes of seeing a clearer communication flow, and maybe even some tool redundancy that could be eliminated.

But if we first explore group members’ understandings of how communication is happening and how they are experiencing it, we may discover that some members lose more focus from interruptions than others do, but didn’t feel able to use a status indicator (like “do not disturb”) on the communication platforms that bring interruptions. Maybe they didn’t feel able because many of the interruptions come from supervisors.

So, this group knows that their internal communication setup is causing friction, and their initial theory is that there are too many ways to communicate with each other, creating cacophony. They may proceed to test this theory by minimizing the number of platforms used for communication for a set period of time. But the platforms they allow to be used during the test period are still bringing frequent notifications of requests and suggestions and updates to employees from their supervisors, so the employees who lose focus when interrupted are no better off.

If, instead, they uncover the belief that is known but unexamined – that employees have no control over how often their supervisors interrupt – they can identify possible solutions to the real source of friction.

Surprising power

That example is just one illustration of the many unknown knowns that may be working through us at any time. Memories, values, biases, intuition and norms are key sources of unknown knowns driving our preferences, judgements and decisions.

The role of shared tacit knowledge, and surfacing “unknown knowns” in organizations is well known (here’s just one reference ). It’s intrinsic to innovation and learning culture, including practices of curiosity, inquiry and reflection. And it’s more likely to flourish in groups with diverse perspectives, psychological safety and some autonomy.

We’re passionate about this way of working. It involves a lot of moments that feel like breakthroughs. Clients have called them their new superpowers. Which brings me back to my wondering about how to meet this moment’s accelerated injustice: wouldn’t superpowers be just the thing?

This inspired me to imagine resources and practices we could provide organizations that they could use on their own without our support (or with our support if that makes more sense for your particular circumstances), even before anything is feeling off.

We’re starting with a multi-piece toolkit we’ll be introducing over the coming months, Time to Level Up: Access Your Team’s Unknown Knowns. The first piece of the kit is available now on our learning site: Breakthrough! A No-Blame Approach to Unlocking Group Impact.

We’re also offering a free download that brings some elements from each of the resources into a meeting you can begin holding, or bring these elements into meetings you’re already holding.

Time to take stock

One of the things I feel most hopeful about is how so many of the approaches and practices that can really make a difference are just. so. simple. And how they cross pollinate, and form foundations for more change. We’ve all encountered some form of the idea “you already have everything you need” in philosophical, spiritual, and psychological traditions. Truly, it is time to take stock.