Expect the unexpected and the Black Swan

One book has brought me to another.I read some time ago, and I have reread this summer,Expect the Unexpected (or You Won’t Find It): A Creativity Tool Based on the Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus from Roger von Oech…and looking for more information about it, I came across The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable from Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb.You can read more from his homepage “fooled by randomness“

The Von Oech’s book is about how we can rethink things in order to increase our Creativity and capability of Innovation.The author, one of the most celebrated thinkers on creativity, uses thirty epigrams (thinking of any kind expressed brief and acuity) of a the presocratic philosopher Heraclitus as a springboard towards innovation. Every thought is accompanied by puzzles, imaginative examples and amusing anecdotes to serves the author for intriguing questions that destroy old habits of reasoning and stimulate the imagination. Roger von Oech thus teaches to turn our expectations, transform the change to our favor and avoid the trap of “the more,the best”; to find creative answers to the more complicated problems. For anyone, from executives from large companies to students or artists, seeking a new approach to the solution of problems or help to make difficult decisions, this book authoritarian invaluable On the other hand, talking about The Black Swan, here you are an interview between Taleb and Punset (spanish) and some other details about it. Some other interviews are here:

-What’s a Black swan?

-Secrets of the Black swan

-Predicting Crisis: Dr. Doom & the Black Swan

A Black swan is an unlikely event, whose effects according with the author’s criteria:

-are a surprise.

-have a major impact.

-and, After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight, as if it had been expected.

Today is the aniversary of an event like that with the 9 /11 terrorist attack , Other Black Swans are Google or You tube.As Eduard Punset says:” What should not recognize the phenomenon of Black Swan until they occur? According to Taleb, human beings we are become obssesed to find out specific, when we should focus on the generalities. We are incapable of actually estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrating and categorize, and not what quite open to reward those who know imagine “impossible“. That’s why The Black Swan it’s worth reading, cause it opens us a new way of thinking using a non-philosophical epistemological approach in which explains, decision theory based on a fixed universe or model of possible outcomes ignores and minimizes the impact of events which are “outside model”. For instance, a simple model of daily stock market returns may include extreme moves such as Black Monday (1987) , but might not model the market breakdowns following the September 11 attacks. A fixed model considers the “known unknowns”, but ignores the “unknown unknowns”. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan events, but we could add as well the Holocaust in the World War II, March 11 ,2004 attacks ,etc. What do you think about it?

[Via http://wewritethefuture.wordpress.com]