Tag: Strategic surprise

Society, Strategic surprise

The illusion of certainty: what Donald Trump’s victory teaches us about willful blindness

We live in a world of surprises, leading to unexpected events, sometimes with far-reaching consequences. But what’s striking about each of these events is that not everyone is surprised by them. In other words, what surprises us depends on who we are. Surprise is a largely self-inflicted phenomenon, the product of blindness. This is the result of blinding beliefs, certainties reinforced by social mechanisms, a bubble of illusion in which we enclose ourselves with those who believe the same things as we do. A typical example of this blindness is Donald Trump’s second victory in the US presidential election.

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Strategic surprise

How do strategic surprises happen? Lessons from 9/11


22 years ago, on September 11, 2001, the world watched in horror as two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York in one of the most spectacular terrorist attacks ever. Behind this immense tragedy, whose geopolitical consequences are still being felt today, lies the failure of the American intelligence apparatus, and the CIA in particular. Despite all the information at its disposal, the CIA failed to anticipate the attack. What explains this failure?

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Uncategorized

How crises disrupt our mental models and what that means

The Covid-19 epidemics constitutes a major event that completely disrupted world life, rendering all forecasts and plans based on them obsolete within a few weeks. The very nature of a surprise is to bring to light an element of our mental models and invalidate it. In short, crises disrupt our mental models. Because a disruption is a process, the effects unfold progressively, on many dimensions, and over a long period.

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entrepreneurship, Strategic surprise, uncertainty

Responding to the Covid-19 Crisis: Three Courses of Action for a CEO

[Version française ici]

In these times of coronavirus epidemic, I have the opportunity to talk to people from very different backgrounds (emergency doctors, researchers, self-employed people, entrepreneurs, retirees, business leaders, etc.) to understand how they “live” the current crisis both personally and professionally. From these discussions, I can draw three courses of action that a CEO can usefully adopt in the face of the extreme and unprecedented situation we are experiencing. (more…)

Strategic surprise, uncertainty

The Four Things that Covid-19 Reminds Us About Decision Making in Uncertainty

The unexpected emergence of the coronavirus and its uncertain consequences remind us of four things that we should have known, or that we knew but did not apply about the environment in which we live: the unpredictability of the future, the difference between risk and uncertainty, the non-linearity of the evolution of the world, and the social construction of surprises.

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