Goodbye to a Tumultuous Year

Illustration: Watercolor by Black Elephant Blog author (December 2016)

As 2016 winds down, it’s fitting in the quiet week before a New Year to consider the meaning of Black Elephants, Black Swans and the other metaphorical creatures of surprise, such as the boiling frog,  who opened up this blog two years ago this month.  There’s been a lot more attention given to them since then in other venues.  It’s surprising but true.  It’s equally surprising but true that the journey of many artists has, it seems to me, much to offer the rapidly changing world in which we find ourselves today–if we were to want to face up to these creatures of surprise.  This is because artists often try to see beyond the surface impressions to get at the truth of things–that’s what gives art its special meaning to many of us.

One could even say that we live in Black Elephant times if, by that, what we mean is what Thomas Friedman referred to in his op-ed of two years ago, called “Stampeding Black Elephants.”  In that article, he defined the metaphor “Black Elephant” as follows:

 “a cross between “a black swan” (an unlikely, unexpected event with enormous ramifications) and the “elephant in the room” (a problem that is visible to everyone, yet no one still wants to address it) even though we know that one day it will have vast, black-swan-like consequences.”

As I understand it, the phrase (which Friedman picked up from an environmentalist he’d recently met) “Black Elephants” refers to the concept of the uncomfortable, unthinkably unpalatable “elephant in the room” that we would rather not discuss or acknowledge, and therefore–too often–fail to address in time.  (This is also known as the “boiling frog syndrome,” or the “ostrich with its head in the sand,” or the “deer in the headlights” syndrome, etc.)

Image: Watercolor, gouache, and ink by Black Elephant Blog author (2014)

This concept covers the increasingly (but extraordinarily dangerous) popular tendency to avoid what the accumulated history of knowledge and scientific progress tells us to be true. And so, perhaps it is another “Black Elephant” to observe that these “elephants” may be multiplying right now (paradoxically and quite sadly as their real-life versions dwindle in number due to poaching and encroachment on their natural habitat.)  Facing up to these “elephants” is something that calls for well-honed critical and creative thinking skills–whereby people of all backgrounds including, of course, artists–join forces in shedding new light and creating new possibilities for dealing with the challenges of today in a fact-based way.  This is in fact how mankind has conquered so many diseases that previously killed so many in childhood.  Understanding how innovative breakthroughs occur,and accelerating our society’s capacities for innovation in so many sectors, are right now key to survival on a collective level.

Fortunately there is more awareness of these challenges, as well as our own inherently human desire to ignore them–aided by the fact of more frequent “black elephant” and “black swan” events in the last two years alone.  It turns out this awareness extends well into the suites of CEOS around the world.  I refer in particular to a recent paper, Thinking the Unthinkable: A New Imperative for Leadership in a Digital Age, which I’ll turn to soon.  Last month I had an opportunity to hear the authors brief an audience on their research findings, and found their conclusions compelling enough to include in a revised syllabus for the coming semester of classes.  Interestingly, they too distinguish in their report between “Black Swans” and “Black Elephants”; the creatures of surprise are everywhere!

Illustration: Watercolor, gouache, ink, pencil, gesso, and coffee grounds by Black Elephant Blog author (2014)

But for now with another spring-like day of temperatures in the 60s Fahrenheit, it’s time to be out enjoying the warm December weather, and re-charging our own personal energy reserves for what promises to be a challenging 2017!   Best wishes to all for a joyous New Year!

The Zoology of Surprise

Image: Watercolor and ink, by Black Elephant Blog author

From boiling frogs to butterflies, hippos to hummingbirds–and black swans, and now “black elephants”— there is a zoological taxonomy evolving to describe how and why we are surprised. We are surprised when a seemingly random event occurs. The rapid proliferation of a new technology, not even imaginable just a few years ago, surprises us. We can be surprised by the generosity of strangers. Or, we can be surprised by an extreme, and extremely dangerous, event or development.

We are surprised, simply, because we were not expecting x, y, or z to occur. How can so obvious, or even banal, a statement be so fascinating and still so poorly understood? Some surprises we like and look forward to, while others we dread or haven’t imagined.

The reasons for surprise are still being investigated as, for example, in the new book by mathematician, David Hand: The Improbability Principle.  Hand and others explain to us how surprises are inevitable: there are laws of improbability! (The Improbability Principle will be addressed in a future blog post.)

As I have considered the issues of surprise, risk, uncertainty, and probability, colorful metaphors recur. Not everyone appreciates metaphors but I do. The “black swan” made famous by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s groundbreaking book of the same name is a case in point. Sometimes, even if not exactly accurate (as we shall see, black swans are not so rare, depending on where you live), the metaphor helps to sharpen our thinking.

The imagery of surprise taken from the natural world seems evocative of so many things, including how inevitably surprised we are the further removed we become from nature itself. In the worlds of science and mathematics, we have discovered that we actually still have so very much to learn about the interactions and behaviors of natural systems. A recent review of two new books made a distinction between the “Newtonian Moment” and the relatively recently recognized “Quantum Moment,” for instance.

Answers may well prove elusive in this quest but the journey I envision on this blog is going to be surprising in many ways. It will convene ideas from disparate sources and thinkers on the origins of surprise and, relatedly, creativity and innovation. So, I will begin with creating a glossary of the “Zoology of Surprise.”