Swans everywhere
In reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, it reinforced something I feel people don’t consider enough.
In the book he points out that Black Swans are highly improbable events with 3 characteristics:
- Unpredictability
- Massive impact
- Our subsequent desire to explain why it was actually predicable all along
We spend so much time thinking about what could happen, making plans, putting systems in place and following lists – all of which helps and to varying degrees is necessary….
However…..
I believe that that real issue is that, too often, organisations lack the skills, flexibility and above all approach to deal with the inevitable Black Swans and move forward…….
Sometime ago I was working with an organisation that had plans and strategies coming out of its ears. Then all of a sudden it was hit with an issue that took away its main market. What did it do? It spent months analysing its plans and risk registers trying to explain why this had happened - whilst making no real effort to actually deal with it. In reality it lacked a senior team (the staff were raring to go!) that was comfortable making decisions that weren’t in the plan…
The result…..? lost time and a problem even bigger than the Black Swan!
When I first started work we were told “Change Management” was a specialist area – for dealing with “big” events……now it’s a basic skill which we all need
We need to accept that the world in which we live is full of imminent black swans…it’s how we react that matters!
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Charles Darwin
