The Roman satirist Juvenal wrote in AD 82 about ("a rare bird in the lands, and very like a black swan") . He meant something whose extreme rarity would compare with that of a black swan. Since a black swan was not known to exist – neither did the bird with which it was being compared. For over 1500 years, the black swan metaphor existed in the imagination for something that could not exist. So, the chances of seeing or experiencing a black swan event were very, very high indeed.
However, the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh made the first European record of sighting a black swan in 1697, when he sailed into, and named, the Swan River on the western coast of New Holland. The sighting was significant in Europe, where "all swans are white" had long been used as a standard example of a well-known truth.
A black swan had been sighted! How rare! How odd! How unpredictable! This went against all common knowledge.
In Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, the sinister and seductive black swan, Odile, is contrasted with the innocent white swan, Odette. Black Swan Events rapidly became known to be not only unpredictable but BAD. Or, as we call them today “negative risks.”
Black Swans became representative of a rare and bad luck occurrence. The name has carried forward from the 17th century into modern life and even modern Project Risk Management. A group of us used to make our living “hunting black swans” in Ocoee Florida. Our company was carefully names Systems Management Inc. as to not scare away customers.
Here we are in the 21st century and we’ve encountered another black swan. A worldwide virus – the Coronavirus. Nothing exemplifies the meaning of a black swan more perfectly to me.
Your project may or may not have Black Swans – but you should do your best to try and identify them, to imagine them and to, as a group, see if you think they could happen to your project. It could come from your most steadfastly held beliefs. Remember, there was no such thing as a black swan for over 1500 years. Don’t fool yourselves – they exist. Saving Changes...
I'm not really sure that I'd call COVID-19 a black swan. A true black swan should be an unknown-unknown, but as Steven Soderbergh so eerily foretold back in 2011, a virus of animal origin becoming a pandemic was less of an "if" and more of a "when".
Perhaps we should lump this into the same bucket as 9/11 - a "failure of imagination"...
Now as far as our projects go, I'm definitely a fan of that idea the Mossad had in World War Z - have a group of highly imaginative folks who are willing to think up impossible scenarios. That's one way to take a bite out of unknown-unknowns...
I'm nearly certain that black swans should be "black swans." I can't post an image here [grumble] but If we assume we know what a white swan is, then when we see a swan and it's a off-color, we'll know it's a swan. We can say it's a "off-color swan" Or, gee... a black swan! We wouldn't be mystified. It wouldn't be an 'unknown unknown'
This is clearly NOT an UNKNOWN UNKNOWN. It's a variant of something we already know. When I first went to Austin, Tx, USA. I fed BLACK squirrels at the capital building. I wasn't dumbfounded as to what they were - they weren't a mystery. They were squirrels... but they are a black variant and they gladly took peanuts from my hands. So the concept that a black swan would make us all fall down and not know what we were confronting is clearly wrong. I'd know a swan if it were purple, or even red.
The only way I could come across an unknown / unknown is if it is something I had never seen or conceived of before. So, I hate to poke my finger in the eye of "risk" knowledge. But a black swan cannot be an unknown - unknown.
But, "Black Swans" is so embedded in our collective PM-ish-ness that it's easiest to use the term (as incorrect as it may be) Saving Changes...
"If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time--a tremendous whack."
