Plan for Being Wrong

This Covid crisis was not a Black Swan. A Black Swan is something that has never been seen before, and all the evidence has been in the other direction. Every White Swan increases the conviction that all Swans are white. All the evidence confirms a belief that is fundamentally wrong. There have been pandemics before, and there were plenty of people talking about it before 2019. Hans Rosling’s book “Factfulness” (2018) listed Pandemic as one of the 5 big risks the world faces, along with Poverty, Financial Meltdown, Climate Change and World War. Financial Meltdown, Poverty, Climate Change and War are not Back Swans either. Read the book “The Black Swan” by Nassim Taleb. By definition, you can’t predict a Black Swan. You can predict that there will be Black Swans that upend our world view. You can build shock absorbers and plan for the fact that things will not go according to plan. A more important question than “Am I right?” is “what are the consequences if I am wrong?”. Plan for being wrong. Plan for adjusting the way you see the world as you engage with it.