It is popular in the agile software development business to quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
The very first thing to establish is the randomness Taaleb speaks about is not the same randomness we find in project work. His randomness is not the same as the randomness we encounter in building things for money. The Black Swans he speaks of may or may not exist in the financial markets. But Black Swans in project work means you simply have not done your homework. Either because you can't afford to do it - a credible reason. Or you are not capable of doing it - you don't know enough about to domain and context to be making decisions. Or you have simply chosen not to do your homework.
The first case is common. We can't afford to find out what can go wrong. It's actually cheaper to just try it and see. This is a domain I am famailar with in the physics world. It's called experimenting. The second case is really saying we're not qualified to make a decision. The response should be - let's go find someone who is. This is the basis of Reference Class Forecasting. The last case seems to be more common these days. I don't see any value in searching so, I'll just start working and we'll discover what we discover when it comes along. No problem. Your money, spend it as you please. Not your money, maybe not.
Taleb's book by the way is full of rhetoric like this ... "Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny." Really? Tell that to the people at CERN, or the engineers building rendezvous and dock software for ISS, or the process control system running the 787 you may have flown on. All stochastic feedback control systems, who's response to random inputs is to stay inside the white lines.
So care is needed when quoting Taleb from a project point of view. Black Swans are common in Australia. Just not here. Disruptive events in the project world are usually an indication of lack of knowledge - and epistemic uncertainty. These uncertainties can be reduced with new information. This is the root word Epistomology.
The counter to Taleb is Popper. Popper was a skeptic. He proposed a rule for scientific inquiries. Nothing can be verified empirically, he said. Science must not rest on any concept of verification. Instead, it must rest on a process of falsification. There are only two kinds of theories: (1) theories known to be wrong; (2) theories that have not yet been proven wrong — not yet falsified. Putting the matter in context, Popper was rebelling against the growth of science.
So when there is some claim made, how can we show the claim to be false? Without that second element - the falsification test - the claim is just blather.
