GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES

The Making of a Black Swan

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Ian Morris
Board of Contributors

Nov 1, 2017 | 08:00 GMT

Around 1510, German theologian and reformer Martin Luther, second from the left, sits with his contemporaries.

Around 1510, German theologian and reformer Martin Luther, second from the left, sits with his contemporaries. When Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door 500 years ago, he triggered one of the biggest black swan events in history.

(HULTON ARCHIVE/Getty Images)

By looking at the past, strategic forecasters can learn lessons for the future. Long-term trends are the stock in trade of companies like Stratfor. And yet, as forecasters know perfectly well, sometimes things just seem to happen. The best-laid plans, backed up by analysis of reams of data, can be rendered obsolete by what the academic Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in a book of the same name, famously called a black swan: "an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences."...

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