In many parts of the world there’s “crisis fatigue” — which isn’t a good thing because it means that one’s numbness to an emergency can result in not doing anything about it. False alarms make it even harder for folks to respond well to a real crisis — and it’s not uncommon right now.
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Farewell to la bise (and handshaking)
Getting used to avoiding handshakes was one thing, but in France (and other parts of Europe), la bise is on the out. I heard this from a friend during the April 2019 timeframe when C-19 had just started to land — and in a small village in France they were ostracized for not engaging in the tradition of la bise.
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Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Knowns, Unknown Unknowns
Donald Rumsfeld in a 2002 press conference fostered the birth of the memes of “known knowns” and “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” which, to be frank, has long been a mystery to me. So I thought I needed to unpack it today as I can see it’s pretty important when considering the nature of black swans (versus white swans). Apparently it reaches back to the Greek era … I wish I had studied history better when I was younger.
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Microsoft Auth Outage
Today there was a major outage of Microsoft services. It lasted roughly for an hour, and it created a great deal of mayhem across all users who use Microsoft products … which is A LOT of people.
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California Fires Detailed
I caught a weather expert’s feed on Twitter where the visualization overlaps with real satellite footage to accentuate the effect of fires happening in California. It happens quite fast, but it lasts in your mind.
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COVID-19 was a “White Swan”
Nassim Taleb popularized the term “Black Swan” and has recently pointed out that COVID-19 can’t be categorized as such. He said it is a “White Swan” instead. Why? Because C-19 didn’t happen all of a sudden with a lack of predictability — we knew enough about it so that we could enact countermeasures, but many countries didn’t do so. It wasn’t, as he calls it, “an unforeseen problem” – which is his definition of a black swan.
Looking back to the early thoughts of Taleb in 2009 on the ideas of risk are quite interesting, as grounded in an HBR piece he penned with collaborators entitled, “The Six Mistakes Executives Make in Risk Management.“
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V-RESAS System in Japan
There’s a beautiful and informative system running in Japan called “V-RESAS” where RESAS stands for:
- Regional
- Economy
- Society
- Analyzing
- System
I guess the “V” must mean “Visual” because it’s gorgeous.
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Nassim Taleb on Extreme Events
Darwin College lecture in 2020 before COVID-19 set in is super interesting. Taleb walks through his notion of Mediocristan versus Extremistan (and there’s a mention of Meritocristan as = Mediocristan). The lecture is introduced by Professor Mary Fowler who gives reference to an interesting quote that goes, “Events, dear boy, events.”
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The C-Suite Digital Transformer: COVID-19
Around March 2020, a multiple-choice question was circulating everywhere as a graphic that made us all chuckle. It introduced a C-suite member that we weren’t really thinking about out in the context of a company’s digital transformation journey. Not the CEO. Nor the CIO. Nor the CMO. It was the C-O-V-I-D-1-9.
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Goodnight Moon And Doom
The artwork for Goodnight Moon was recontextualized for this new era with the clever word replacements that read: Goodnight Moon. Goodnight Zoom. Goodnight sense of impending doom.
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