The notion of a Black Swan as a low probability event with high unfavorable impact is a common example of the "long tailed" probability distribution found in many domains from finance to manned space flight.
The Black Swan as a excuse of not doing your home and seeking all the possible sources of disruption is common in some domains. The notion of Unknown Unknowns has been presented before. Unknown Unknowns is a start. Managing Projects in the Presence of Unknowns. And Colossus is the last. This discussion of course went off track when there was major push back on the "knowability" of these unknowns.
No magic here, just plain out Bayesian statistics and it's application to the population of possible outcomes. But not necessarily observable at the needed time by an individual or worse an individual inexperienced or not trainied to look for those pesky black swans. Without the math, experience or processes, it does look like magic. But sadly for many of our 401(k)'s, the facts are becoming clear (Too Big to Fail, The BIg Short, and All The Devils Are Here, there were no Black Swans in the sense of Unknown Unknowns in domains where we would actually discover the processes if we simply wanted to. Instead it seems to be a case of simple ignorance, likely intentional, to transfer risk to fulfill a political agenda or fulfill the quest from greed. So let's move off the opinion puff pieces based on populist literature and back the actual mathematical basis for the Black Swan.
Here's a news article from our local paper that demonstrates the basis of the "knowability" of risks and the intentional ignorance of this knowledge. And more importantly the notion of only looking in the obvious places for potential risks is the source of these Swans.
Certainty the Black Swan definition of a low probability high impact event is applicable to Fukushima. But everyone knows there is an island facing slip fault not far off shore in Japan and that fault is active. Simple geology can predict the outcome that happened. To conjecture, as TEPCO did, that this is not a problem is the same as Donald Rumsfeld's conjecture that the tribes of Iraq will willing accept democracy after the removal of the dictator, or Taleb's "we just didn't understand the complexity of the financial markets," or software project managers saying "we just didn't have enough information about the complexities of the process to see that the cost and schedule would overrun by 200%."
Are you out of your frick'in mind?
When we talk about risk, the only risk that can not be considered is one that is unknowable. We may not be able to afford the cost of seekiing all the risks. That's OK sort'a if we acknowledge we can't afford to look. But the lame excuse of it was an "unknown unknown," is just that, lame. Maybe an unafforable unknown. But if the risk is knowable, then there is no Black Swan as an excuse for the project going in the ditch - or worse for the foreign policy going in the ditch.
