According the metaphorical story that opens Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, until the discovery of Australia, everyone in the Old World knew that all swans were white. Years of empirical evidence proved it — nobody had ever seen anything but a white swan.
It came as a shock then when the sighting of a single black swan destroyed such a simple theory. All it took was one example to overthrow the status quo.
The world faces some big shocks in the realms of sustainability and climate change, and the ways of thinking about the future described in Taleb's book will come in handy. In Taleb's view, a Black Swan event...
- Lies way outside the realm of regular expectations — it's an outlier
- Carries extreme impact
- Seems explainable after the fact
The event that perfectly fits this bill, and the reason Taleb's book is so vital today, is the financial meltdown of 2008. READ MORE >>
via blogs.hbr.org
