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