“. . . after the police take my life . . .”
Because these Black Swans weren’t uncovered, Van
Zandt and his colleagues never saw the situation for what it
was: Griffin wanted to die, and he wanted the police to do it
for him.
Nothing like this—a shootout on a deadline?—had ever
happened to the FBI, so they tried to fit the information into
what had happened in the past. Into the old templates. They
wondered, What does he actually want? After scaring them
for a bit, they expected Griffin to pick up the phone and
start a dialogue. No one gets killed on deadline.
Or so they thought.
UNCOVERING UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS
The lesson of what happened at 3 p.m. on June 17, 1981, in
Rochester, New York, was that when bits and pieces of a
case don’t add up it’s usually because our frames of
reference are off; they will never add up unless we break
free of our expectations.
Every case is new. We must let what we know—our
known knowns—guide us but not blind us to what we do not
know; we must remain flexible and adaptable to any
situation; we must always retain a beginner’s mind; and we
must never overvalue our experience or undervalue the
informational and emotional realities served up moment by
moment in whatever situation we face.
But those were not the only important lessons of that
tragic event. If an overreliance on known knowns can