EVERYTHING MATTERS / 02 : LUCY BLACK-SWAN
This Pandemic Is Not A Black Swan Event: How Metaphors Shape Decision-Making
For this second release of ‘Everything Matters’, IAM co-founder Lucy Black-Swan shares an essay about black swan events and how understanding better this metaphor can help organisations and citizens make more conscious decisions during the uncertain weeks, months and years to come.
During the last weeks some media outlets (and venture capital firms) have wrongly described the COVID-19 pandemic as the “black swan of our times” and by doing so feeding a disempowering myth of black swan events as embodiments of evil forces that end up discouraging citizens and misleading public attention with clickbait headlines.
To avoid making a wrong analysis that ends up amplifying and perpetuating over time, I share below a 3-part reflection that connects the theory behind this beautiful metaphor, a decision-making story related to the pandemic and lessons that can help us address the environmental emergency.
Part I: The theory behind this beautiful metaphor
To start with this reflection I would like to share a short personal story with a subtle disclaimer. My name is Lucy Black-Swan. For many years, way before I started working on strategic foresight, I have felt a strong attraction to the black swan concept. I first learned about this concept, during my early university days in a Philosophy class, where the work of philosopher Karl Popper and his theory of scientific falsification was discussed. Popper used the black swan as a metaphor to show how scientific ideas can never be proven true, regardless of how many observations appear to support it. However, a single contrary result can prove a theory to be false.
These metaphor was developed further by Nassim Nicholas Taleb into the black swan theory in the infamous book The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable, which is the main source of this Wikipedia article where a black swan event is defined as
“an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalised after the fact with the benefit of hindsight”.
Mainstream media often use this theory in a shallow way when describing catastrophic events as black swan events, a use of the term that brings many drawbacks as this doesn’t allow understanding the profound meaning of this theory.
Scrolling deeper into the same Wikipedia article, we can find the three attributes that identify a black swan event according to Taleb:
1- The event is a surprise (to the observer).
2- The event has a major effect.
3- After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalised by hindsight, as if it could have been expected; that is, the relevant data were available but unaccounted for in risk mitigation programs. The same is true for the personal perception by individuals.
But a “surprise” or “major effect” does not necessarily have a negative impact. A black swan can also describe a large scale episode in history with mainly positive effects as many unexpected scientific discoveries or artistic achievements, or even the rise of the internet or the invention of the personal computer. These legitimate black swan events have a huge impact across industries, cultures and have direct and indirect impacts on every single human being living on Planet Earth.
The main problem with dominant media narratives misunderstanding and misusing the black swan theory to describe the current pandemic, is that they are driving the public attention in the result (the unpredicted high impact event) and not in the process (the acts that prevented the anticipation of the event).
Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno (a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan) was the 2nd-century Latin expression from the where the phrase “black swan” derived, becoming a symbol for the impossible, because black swans were presumed not to exist until the 16th century when Dutch explorers saw black swan in Western Australia.
The black swan theory makes evident the fragility of our systems of thought, in a very natural way. We confine our idea of reality to what we already know. We are limited by our experiences, languages and the society in which we are immersed. These systems allow us to navigate within the complexity of reality. This is why we create them and why we postulate them as the only truth, the obvious way of being or thinking, and then whatever else is outside of its parameters is not possible, not good or just does not exist. The finding of black swans in Australia can be read into as an invitation to open our collective minds and understand that there is no system of thought that, as time goes by, will be immune to new findings, to being questioned or simply discarded. This applies to the multiple building blocks of our reality, including religions, belief systems or sciences.
Applying this logic to the current crisis, it becomes evident that the idea of a pandemic is not something unexpected or unimaginable. On the contrary, it has been part of our languages for a long time. Our species, the Homo Sapiens, have experienced several along its recent and far away history. Supranational organisations as the WHO have often warned governments about the need to develop protocols and invest in related research. Contemporary society has already lived through pandemic diseases such as H1N1 or HIV and just 100 years ago the Spanish Flu killed over 50,000,000 humans. Even Bill Gates gave a TED talk in 2015 alerting about the need to allocate resources and designing protocols for potential global outbreaks. The COVID-19 pandemic was not something impossible or unimaginable and therefore it is not a black swan event. Then why did not western governments see it coming? Why did they not acted early on, while hundreds of people were already dying in China back in January? These are key questions that will help us avoid repeating the same mistakes in other contexts.
Part II: A decision-making story related to the pandemic
Continuing with this reflection an shifting to a smaller scale, I would like to share the implications of this pandemic from the perspective of a small business owner and organiser of a non-profit international event that takes place every spring in Barcelona since 2015: the IAM Weekend, a gathering about the futures of the internet.
As part of our curatorial approach, every year we develop a conceptual research theme which we announce right after each edition. Back in March 2019 we announced the theme for 2020: “The Weirdness of Interdependencies”. An abstract concept unraveled in The Everything Manifesto, that suddenly became quite tangible as the pandemic spread across the Planet.
The 6th edition of the IAM Weekend was planned to start on Thursday, March 19th. We were expecting more than 300 attendees and around 30 speakers and workshop hosts, more than 80% of them coming from other countries, mostly from European cities. But on the afternoon of Friday, February 28th, after a short conversation with my partner Andres, we decided to immediately notify all participants that we were forced to change our original plans for a physical gathering and therefore recommending not to travel to Barcelona. Instead of cancelling or postponing, we started working right away in adapting the whole event experience to a remote internet edition. Earlier that week, the first COVID-19 case in Peninsular Spain had been identified in Barcelona and the declaration of the state of alarm in Spain, announced 2 weeks later, was still inconceivable.
After sending a video message explaining the situation to more than 300 participants, we started receiving multiple replies. Most of them expressed their solidarity and supported what we considered our civic duty. Some described our decision as exaggerated, unnecessary or even as “abundance of caution”. But also many participants told us that they still planned to come to Barcelona as back then the general perception of this crisis was limited to China and the north of Italy. This meant that our decision could have serious implications in the credibility and financial situation of the company and therefore in our physical and emotional health while managing this unexpected crisis. We were giving up the ticket sales expected for the last weeks before the event, which the company needed to cover several costs related to the project and the sudden change of plans. I mention this only to illustrate the financial pressure that the persons behind independent events like ours face every year which is tightly related to the context of making such difficult decisions.
As a small, young and adaptive organisation, we obviously had several advantages to address this situation. We created IAM less than 6 years ago to explore and understand the internet as cultures along developing a creative and alternative approach to strategic foresight and year after year our practice has evolved into designing a broad range of tools for collective learning and decision-making, using our insight of internet cultures as a key asset to navigate change and complexity. Therefore, this change of plans was quite natural for us, for our community and for the group of collaborators and advisors that helped us during the days after the decision was made. I can also imagine how difficult it is for bigger companies to adapt during these uncertain times, especially those in early stages of digital transformations or those not familiar with internet cultures.
Continuing with this reflection, I asked myself how did we make such a difficult decision in such a rapid way, while being conscious of the negative financial consequences it could have? And let me emphasise, we took this decision rapidly but not lightly.
In retrospective, I have been trying to figure out how I analysed the situation around this decision before it was interwoven with the perspective of Andres, and I could say that the trigger was a conversation with my mother. Around those days, she asked me if I expected that the virus would be controlled in Spain and Europe. My answer was: “Yes”. Then, she asked me a counter question: “Lucy, are you answering as a company owner wanting that the situation is controlled or as a person who knows what will happen?”
Since my mother asked me to position myself, my logic did not change but I became aware of my own bias and how I wanted the situation to be. Also I realised that when facing confusion human beings can rely on their primary value system. Andres and I decided to act from basic values which we consider increasingly relevant as responsibility, solidarity and empathy. We took this decision going beyond a financial perspective, but without denying it, while trying to minimise the negative implications and having a clear focus on our civic duty.
Two weeks after we took this decision, the virus was spreading everywhere and several events across the world were cancelled or postponed. The state of alarm was declared by the government of Spain, the borders were closed and not only it was not possible to travel to Barcelona anymore but also it was not possible for millions of citizens to leave home, while public health systems were collapsing and hundreds of deaths were reported daily. The new reality prevailed, but we were able to adapt and deliver an internet edition of our event for more than 300 participants joining from around the world, sharing much need collective critical hope.
Part III: Lessons that can help us address the environmental emergency
This pandemic is not a black swan, just as the environmental emergency is not a climate change. While there is a physical, temporal and emotional distance between causes and effects, these events and their consequences can feel far away and we may prefer to look in another direction. But the signs of alert are always there. The possible implications are often quite evident. We are generally aware of them. We often sense what’s coming but we prefer to stay in the status quo shelter. The ruminations, the invisible repetitive thoughts that surround us, are difficult to follow as quite often they don’t obey a financial logic or the comfort of existing conditions.
Reality is complex. For an individual it is just too hard to deal with such scales of complexity, and we end up using established frameworks that make it easier to navigate it. Very often these frameworks are nothing else than avoiding the idea of changing and resisting changes as if nothing changed. This logic and approach to deal with reality is necessary to some extent. It would be impossible to get out of bed everyday without these mental frameworks but we should be aware about the perspective from where we make any decision, who or what is influencing it and the consequences this can have.
This suggests a thought experiment we can all try ourselves: to be aware of the perspective from where we are making decisions in order to analyse the context that shapes the choices we make everyday as organisations, as professionals, as citizens and as humans. Let’s ask ourselves how our behaviour could change if our decisions were always dictated by basic values as responsibility, solidarity and empathy?
In the challenging situation IAM was facing, taking a rapid decision and following these key values gave us 20 days to adapt and redesign the in-person event to a remote experience, translating the core elements of the IAM Weekend experience into a digital context, with the support of our community. Acting early on from a position of collective responsibility gave us the time and peace of mind needed to address the implications of the decision.
Coming back to the theory of black swan events, from my perspective, now what matters more than asking what is the potential impact of this pandemic, is asking why governments or companies did not see or did not want to see what was coming and how this influenced their decision-making process. The intention of this questioning exercise is not about blaming our leaders but about learning collectively from our mistakes in order to make better decisions in any upcoming crisis.
In my life, I have learned that the value of the black swan metaphor is about being humble and accepting that there is no absolute truth. All thought systems that we know today or tomorrow will be challenged, and that is totally fine. There is no expert who can predict the future. Reality and our responses to reality are always subjective.
As paradoxical as it may sound, the only truth is that nobody has the truth. We all have it. This is why we need to listen to each other instead of just following established behavioural or social patterns and constantly question our decisions by asking ourselves why we act the way we do.
If we become more aware, both individually and collectively, we’ll become stronger, wiser and face this large scale crisis better. The scale and complexity of the challenges we’re facing will only increase. The environmental emergency is still here and is already being described as a “green swan”, a mutation of the black swan concept which states that while the effects of global warming are highly uncertain, there is a high degree of certainty that major change is on the way and therefore certainty about the need for urgent action. The organisation using this term is not an activist group as one can imagine but the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the central bank for central banks, who recently released a report alerting that climate catastrophes are even more serious than most systemic financial crises.
Beyond economical or societal implications, we as humans also need to keep in mind that many other living beings are also suffering this emergency. As we mention in The Everything Manifesto, we should not approach these complex emergencies using only human-centered or society-centered frameworks and become more conscious about our human bias, about how and from where we are experiencing reality. This perspective shift will help us make better decisions for the Planet and the living beings coexisting inside it, including billions of humans.
‘Everything Matters’ is a year-long editorial experiment to unfold IAM’s research theme for 2020: The Weirdness of Interdependencies from a multidimensional spectrum of perspectives. If you are interested in contributing an essay, interview, or opinion article, please send your proposal to everything@iam-internet.com.
About the author
Lucy Black-Swan is the co-founder of IAM and co-director of IAM Weekend. Applying her trans-disciplinary academic background across fields as psychology, marketing for luxury brands, trend research and digital strategy in 2014, together with Andres Colmenares, she launched IAM where she has developed creative foresight and curatorial design projects with foundations, cultural institutions, universities and media companies as Mobile World Capital Barcelona, Tate, University of Arts London, Red Bull, ELISAVA and BBC, along with a number of experimental ventures, including events about the futures of internet as the annual IAM Weekend in Barcelona, video series as We Are Internet and the recently announced The Billion Seconds Initiative.
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Learn more about our work at IAM-internet.com and read The Everything Manifesto, a collection of thought experiments for the next billion seconds.
