outside our regular expectations and therefore cannot be
predicted.
This is a crucial concept in negotiation. In every
negotiating session, there are different kinds of information.
There are those things we know, like our counterpart’s name
and their offer and our experiences from other negotiations.
Those are known knowns. There are those things we are
certain that exist but we don’t know, like the possibility that
the other side might get sick and leave us with another
counterpart. Those are known unknowns and they are like
poker wild cards; you know they’re out there but you don’t
know who has them. But most important are those things we
don’t know that we don’t know, pieces of information
we’ve never imagined but that would be game changing if
uncovered. Maybe our counterpart wants the deal to fail
because he’s leaving for a competitor.
These unknown unknowns are Black Swans.
With their known knowns and prior expectations so firmly
guiding their approach, Van Zandt, and really, the entire
FBI, were blind to the clues and connections that showed
there was something outside of the predictable at play. They
couldn’t see the Black Swans in front of them.
I don’t mean to single out Van Zandt here. He did all of
law enforcement a service by highlighting this event and he
told me and a room full of agents the story of that horrible
June day during a training session at Quantico. It was an
introduction to the suicide-by-cop phenomenon—when an
individual deliberately creates a crisis situation to provoke a