Yesterday, I saw a guy full-on streaking on a major thoroughfare, dancing around with his arms raised in a way that reminded me of Brad Pitt’s “Burn After Reading” dance.
Anyway. Today, start your writing with some totally black swan shit like that— something that came out of nowhere and couldn’t have been foreseen at all.
But, I’d offer the idea of differentiating between a true black swan event and a “gray rhino” event— a term coined by Michele Wucker, author and policy analyst specializing in the world economy and crisis anticipation, in her book The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore, which describes a gray rhino as a highly probable, high impact yet neglected threat. (She points out in the book: the housing bubble bursting in 2008, the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters, the new digital technologies that upended the media world, the fall of the Soviet Union...all things evident well in advance.)
Let’s go.