We all worry about threats, dangers, and uncertainties that we cannot predict or even minimally recognize. But what if we’re trying to run before we can walk?
In 2015, Frank Hoffman coined the term “pink flamingos” to describe “inevitable surprises” that only come as a surprise because people refuse to recognize they are inevitable.
A black swan is an event or situation which is unpredictable and for which the consequences could not be measured…Thinking historically about the future means dealing openly with those things we want to avoid or are in denial about. These are what I call our pink flamingoes. A pink flamingo is a predictable event that is ignored due to cognitive biases of a senior leader or a group of leaders trapped by powerful institutional forces. These are the cases which are “known knowns,” often brightly lit, but remaining studiously ignored by policymakers.
Over time, I’ve come to care less and less about black swans. The problem that Nassim Nicholas Taleb identified is certainly real. We poorly at best anticipate outliers outside of normal expectations with extreme consequences. We also generate pat retroactive explanations for these events that underrate the uncertainty and contingency associated with them. There’s nothing wrong about the concept.
But much of Taleb’s original writing about black swans is not as much a parable about prophecy as it is polemic about social forces that obstruct or neglect prediction and adaptation. This foreshadowed what has now become a common “failure mode” for overly cerebral people. They tend to underrate how difficult it is to get other people to do what you want (or even behave legibly).
When they inevitably run into social difficulties, it absolutely wrecks them. In some ways, focusing on abstract analytical problems provides a refuge from the ugliness inherent in getting what you want out of others. Especially at scale. Moreover, ideas are cheap and execution is expensive. It is the best time in human history to formulate, record, and distribute ideas. This has not yielded better outcomes.
Pink flamingos are, and perhaps always have been, more worthy of attention than black swans. Human foresight is limited and even in the best of cases we will be taken by surprise. In a permissive political environment and with effective institutions, we can still “improvise, adapt, overcome.” But that’s the rub. We rarely have either of those things, at least relative to our expectations.
Human nature obeys the conservation of energy principle. We put off the costly, stressful, conflict-stimulating, and potentially unsolvable. Most large and known problems remain unaddressed because they involve any and/or all of the above.