One night last week, as I was driving home from work in the dark, the cars in front of me braked suddenly. After executing my own immediate response I quickly determined the cause, a Black Swan walking across the 4 lane road.
Why did it cross the road? The answer is obvious, to get to the other side – where there is a large pond in the middle of a roundabout.
Many will argue that I could have anticipated this event, swan migrating to a pond, but that would reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of the Black Swan syndrome. A Black Swan event cannot be predicted, by definition, only rationalised after the event.
Unfortunately this industry is plagued by those who sieze on an event and rationalise how it could have been anticipated and should have been planned for. This aspect has been discussed recently in a good article by Geary Sikich. Geary sums up the issue very well – “Being able to respond rather than being able to forecast, facilitates the ability to respond to the consequences of an event.”
For me, this black swan event was the trigger to resume blogging. Creativity is in someways like resilience, you never know when or how an incident/inspiration will strike.
Because I have rehearsed sudden braking in other situations, and I trusted my vehicle to respond appropriately, then the swan on the road was not a problem. If I had needed to follow any written plan or process that I had not internalised, then the outcome would have been a different story.
BCM can be about anticipation and planning, resilience is about what you do, and how you respond, when confronted with something you have never anticipated.
For a while the process zealotry surrounding BCM made me question why I would bother to think and write about these issues, but I have identified a new motivation.
Time to promote the ‘zen of resilience’.
Resilience, a state of mind.
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