Questorming: exploring the unknown unknowns

swombat.com

23 points·swombat··5 comments

Your not exploring unknown unknowns - your identifying the labels that you don't understand in the context of a project. Still a very useful methid to chart out what u know and what u don't know.

The only real way to learn about unknown unknowns other than smacking into them hard is to talk to someone in tbd field. It's the fastest most efficient way.

Well, I'd argue that finding out the limits of what you know is a good step towards turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns...

One really doesn't have anything to do with the other but I wont belabour the point.

Relying on linguistic mapping of previously known relationships is a poor system for discovering unknown unknowns. talking to someone in that space is orders of magnitudes more efficient.

When such a person is available... sure. But when it's a unique subject (e.g. a startup's business model) for which there is no expert other than yourself, mapping your own knowledge of the topic and finding leverage points to expand it is extremely useful.

The book example is just an example. There are lots of materials out there about writing books, so using Questorming to explore this is indeed a waste of time, but it provides a useful example.

The more I think about this more I dislike the idea of sitting around and thinking in a room.

To really figure out unknown unknowns for a business model, you should be talking to the people who are already in the market, customers or reading trade literature.

Sitting around in a room alone doing this is probably a just a huge waste of time.

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