What Do You Know—And What Don’t You Know Yet?

Hi leaders,

I’ve had this diagram (or is it a meme?) stuck in my head the last few days.

Maybe you’ve seen it before: it’s four quadrants and one says “Things you know”, the next “Things you don’t know.” Then the bottom two quadrants say “Things you don’t know you know” and “Things you don’t know you don’t know.”

For Women’s History Month, we have a Sway Skills scheduled with a panel of women business leaders, and I’ve been going over what I want to discuss and also just thinking about the role of women in business.

This little exercise has been a great way to trace some of my thoughts and the questions I have, so, even though it’s kind of cheating, I am going to pose these four questions to you:

The bottom right quadrant has been especially haunting me lately. In some ways, it’s the loudest, scariest part of the diagram, but I’ve also found a lot of hope in the bottom left section. There are things inside each of us that we already know but haven’t yet brought into consciousness. Thinking on these things helps me remember that human beings have a lot more capacity and power than we know.