A new paradigm has arrived... what now?

When you wake up in the morning in a completely different world and don't know how you got there.

People with protective masks, empty shelves, a quiet, tense situation...are you allowed to laugh, to greet someone joyfully embracing or how could it be that yesterday the world was still an 8- 17 o'clock time day with lunch breaks, weekends and planned holidays.

Such a situation is called the "Black Swan" after Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The term was made popular by him, a finance professor, writer and former Wall Street trader. Taleb wrote about the idea of a black swan in his 2007 book before the events of the 2008 financial crisis.

A Black Swan is an unpredictable event that goes beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially serious consequences. Events with a Black Swan are characterized by their extreme rarity, their severe effects and the widespread claim that they were obvious in retrospect.

 Black Swan events can cause catastrophic damage to an economy, and since they are unpredictable, the only way to prepare for them is to build adaptable systems (see also Liquid Structure/Corporate Process* want to know more info hello@krausandkraus.com ).

Relying on standard predictive tools can both fail and increase susceptibility to black swans by spreading risk and providing false security.

Understanding a Black Swan is hardly possible, but dealing with it is a major challenge to the whole system, the processes, but most of all to the people, to society. As we are all painfully experiencing right now.

Jim Chappelow (American Independent Consulting Economist) wrote in an article about it:

"Taleb argued that since Black Swan events are impossible to predict and yet have catastrophic consequences because of their extreme rarity, it is important that people always assume that a Black Swan event is possible, whatever it may be, and plan accordingly.”

Taleb describes a black swan as an event that

1. the disproportionate role of high-profile, difficult-to-predict and rare events outside the range of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology

2. the incalculability of the probability of resulting rare events using scientific methods (due to the nature of small probabilities).

3. the psychological prejudices that blind people, both individually and collectively, to the uncertainty and massive role of a rare event in historical affairs.

Since there are no known experiences and knowledge and since it is completely NEW and cannot be solved with the knowledge at our disposal, we are helpless in the first moment of the situation.

Now we are just in the middle of the situation of a "Black Swan".

It still looks as if we will get the "Black Swan" under control with the management methods we are familiar with, our usual behaviour in dealing with crises.

All the knowledge available to us as individuals is only partially effective, because we not only need new processes and behaviours, but our inner attitude in dealing with a completely new and unknown situation presents us with an even greater challenge.

Concerns and unreflected fears are the worst advisors...but how to deal with this situation in a new, innovative, flexible and fearless way?

How to understand the situation step by step and attentively and how to think and act together in new models / possibilities that were unthinkable a short time ago?

What is the important thing?

What is solidarity and what creates a future?

It is like a white space in which I first have to orientate myself, because my old, learned parameters no longer work in this space.

Getting involved in the moment and making meaningful decisions from the moment is the art of the hour.

But what does it take?

What are your ideas?

How do you deal with them?

I am looking forward to exchange and can be reached via blog or email hello@krausandkraus.com.