Life is uncertain at best; at worst it is downright terrifying. Especially if it’s your job to decide what new course your business should take. And as you know, if you are a CEO or marketing director, it is that wild uncertainty that makes your business life so exciting, sometimes too much so, and so difficult to tame.
In his book The Black Swan—The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb details his position that uncertainty is something we should embrace; that preparedness, not predictability, is what we should seek; and that we can deal with almost anything if we’re willing to calculate the consequences. (At least that’s my take on the book. I highly recommend you read it and draw your own conclusions.)
The symbolic lesson of the black swan (and the central theme of the book) comes from the bird itself. As the author notes in the first sentence of his book, “people believed all swans were white until black swans were discovered in Australia.” Empirical evidence had only confirmed the existence of white swans; therefore, a black swan was outside the realm of fact, and thus highly improbable. An artist may have thought of one, and even painted one, but no scientist had ever seen one.
The black swan event, as he describes it, is that highly improbably massive event, like the attack of 9/11, or any severe stock market crash, or when a turkey finds out in surprising and deadly fashion that Thanksgiving has come. These black swan events are generally impossible to predict and extremely impossible to prevent.
Mr. Talib sums up the significance of the black swan lesson with the following statement: “It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experiences and the fragility of our knowledge.”
When I came upon that statement, I realized that Taleb was describing the need for exactly what we are addressing with CultureWaves™.
CultureWaves is designed as a continuous process for taming wild, random and often-unmanageable information in an uncertain world. As we collect tangible evidence and observations from human experience and then connect it through something we call intuitive science, we are preparing people and companies to deal more effectively with uncertainty and to be more confident in making decisions.
