Many of the most disruptive events are unpredicted until they appear. Yet they change the world. Disruptive events can be hugely positive…iPhone, or hugely negative…HIV/AIDS. As you look back through history you see such events over and over. With hindsight the disruptive impact is crystal clear.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written an exceptional book explaining how such events explain just about everything about the world. But still, we, and especially the experts, are blind to them. Worse, we do things that increase our blindness and so our unreadiness to take advantage of such events. We become comfortable that our ideas, our research, our analysis, and our predictions based on these things will show us the best path forward, the best new product to release, the way the world will go.
We become complacent and confirmation bias sets in.
In The Black Swan, subtitled The Impact of the Highly Improbably, Taleb demolishes our complacency and offers thoughts on how to change your thinking. In the new edition he even offers some tools to exploit these Black Swan events.
Most importantly, whether you take advantage of his ideas or not, The Black Swan will change the way you think about planning for the future. It will help you do the thing that leads to tremendous success if done well or failure if ignored: notice improbable events quickly and realize the implications for you and your business.
You’ll never again listen to experts in quite the same way. You, and your organization, will be the better for it.