The Rumsfeld Matrix

On the other hand, it is important to keep this in balance with what you do know. One of the key tools to achieve this is the Known/Unknown matrix, or the Rumsfeld Matrix, which was made famous by Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense. This chart can be a valuable tool to track your progress and ongoing development as a manager.

The first version you produce will give you an idea of where you need to focus your efforts on learning initially, and, as you repeat the exercise regularly, you can use it to assess your proportion of knowns and unknowns.

As you become more experienced and confident as a manager, you will trend toward more knowns versus unknowns. The idea is not to eliminate all unknowns, but to simply understand what they might be, while affirming and reaffirming the things you are knowledgeable and confident on. Here is an image of the Rumsfeld Matrix:

As an accidental manager, you may not have had the time or opportunity to prepare for the new responsibilities to shape the role before being "it." You can, and should, use this to your advantage. As a newly bestowed accidental manager, you need to maximize the opportunity to ask open and unassuming questions. Tell people that while you don't know something, you want to learn, using open questions like these:

• Where can I get more information on this?
• What are the pros and cons of this process?
• Can you help us to improve this?

Ultimately, as you learn more, your proportion of unknowns will decrease, while the proportion of knowns will increase. As a result, you'll progress along the learning curve, which is no different from learning a new technology as a developer.

When you start, you are likely to have more unknowns than knowns, and you'll be asking more questions than answers. But don't – and never let yourself – be put off! You are still adding value by asking these questions, both to yourself and to the team and organization.

In fact, asking the right questions is often cited as the most important and powerful skill in senior management. This is often referred to as part of corporate governance. Think about the latest corporate scandals and crises in large-scale organizations, which are often traced back to a lack of adequate corporate governance. Those at the very top can fail to recognize the impending cliff edge that the organization is headed toward until it's too late.

To be reasonable, a manager is not expected to know absolutely everything that is happening at any one time. This reinforces the need to ask judicious questions at the right moment, and, in return, getting truthful and insightful answers back. Especially as an accidental manager, one of the key behaviors you should learn and demonstrate early on is the canny shrewdness to ask challenging questions. This has the power to make people respect you, even if your domain knowledge level is low.