Covid-19 impact: the balance shifts from knowns to unknowns

The ‘known unknown’ framework has been in use for decades to help orient scenario planning in business and politics. While it gained notoriety in a military context in 2002, it can be applied to almost any sector and is particularly relevant in the current period given the uncertainties introduced by the Covid-19 crisis. The telecoms sector has undergone significant structural change in the last five years, including changes to network ownership models (from tower sell-offs and virtualisation), media convergence, and the push to sell 5G and IoT products into enterprise verticals. Covid-19 has introduced new considerations and further altered the existing outlook – in general, it has shifted the balance of risks towards factors that are evident but whose potential impacts are not fully understood (the so-called ‘known unknowns’).