Elephants, Swans and Jellyfish for planning.

societyleadership

18 Jan

Video Transcript

The concepts of Black Elephants, Swans and Jellyfish help us build foresight capability and improve our planning for impact and future growth in times of uncertainty.

Today more than ever, the world is changing faster and faster across social, political, cultural, technological and environmental fronts.

Changes are happening, not as isolated events, but rather as far-reaching, rapid and simultaneous changes that are connected and interconnected. The result is increasing uncertainty about what the future will bring and how we are best able to position ourselves and our organisations to respond to uncertain futures.

A question we must ask is how we are going to produce plans, make decisions and grow our organisations in the face of futures full of complexity, uncertainty, contradictions and chaos.

To help our planning process Sardar and Sweeney developed the “Menagerie of Postnormal Potentialities” in their 2015 article “The Three Tomorrows of Postnormal Times”.

The menagerie provides simple tools to use in our planning to expand our thinking and improve our foresight.

The first member of the menagerie is the Black Elephant. It is the elephant in the room that no one can see or chooses to ignore. We know it exists yet no one is prepared to address it. To identify Black Elephants ask the questions:

What are the obvious dangers we are ignoring?
What issues/things are people afraid, embarrassed, and/or uncomfortable to talk about?
In other words, what Black Elephants are staring us in the face?

Borrowed from author Nasim Nicholas Taleb the next animal is the Black Swan. The Black Swan represents an outlier, something unexpected or arriving “out of the blue” – a surprise. It also has a major impact, just like the discovery of Black Swans in Australia when the dominate theory in historical Europe had been they did not exist. In addition, when Black Swans appear their appearance is often rationalised by hindsight. “We knew this would happen” type comments.

It is important to always assume a Black Swan event is a possibility, whatever it may be, and to try to plan accordingly. Our aim should not be to predict events which are unpredictable, but to build robustness in our organisations against negative events while still exploiting positive opportunities.

In organisational planning the best way to identify Black Swans is by what has been referred to as the 10th Man Rule which was expressed best in the movie World War Z when a character describes the process as: “If nine of us who get the same information arrived at the same conclusion, it’s the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem. The tenth man has to start thinking about the assumption that the other nine are wrong.” This is also commonly referred to as playing the role of “devils advocate”.

Finally, we have Black Jellyfish. Black Jelly Fish are things we think we know and understand but which turn out to be far more complex and uncertain then we expect. Why jellyfish? In changing ocean climates jellyfish blooms have caused shutdowns to coastal power plants around the world. One jellyfish seems unpowerful, but a bloom can cause chaos. Another good example is if you think of a cyber security attack on one company on the stock exchange – potentially dramatic for that company but relatively manageable. What about a simultaneous attack on all companies on the stock exchange on the same day – you have massive chaos.

You can use the process of identifying Black Elephants, Swans and Jellyfish in your planning to drive new thinking, support diverse plans, build responsive systems and stretch your planning paradigms into longer time horizons. The aim is to build adaptive, dynamic planning that supports organisational resilience as your organisations confront futures full of complexity, uncertainty, contradictions and chaos.

If you are making decisions for impact and future growth it is critical you bring foresight thinking into play. In doing so your organisation’s ability to grow and thrive in the face of futures full of complexity, uncertainty, contradictions and chaos will improve dramatically.

I hope you found this overview of Sardar and Sweeneys “Menagerie of Postnormal Potentialities” useful.

If you want to keep the conversation going message me directly or visit our website at insightandforesight.com.au

Have a great day.