Learning from Swans – COVID-19

Learning from Swans – COVID-19

COVID-19 has been described by many as a ‘Black Swan’. A ‘Black Swan’ is a metaphor which has crept into our language to describe the increasingly disrupted times we find ourselves grappling with.

Swans feature richly in metaphor, stories, fairytales and idiom. What can businesses, communities and governments take away from their lessons to help navigate a pathway fraught with complexity into a positive future?

The term ‘Black Swan’ is based on an ancient saying that presumed black swans did not exist. It is predicated on an old-world northern hemisphere presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported all their feathers were indeed white. In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent.

The term was popularized in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, which appeared in 2007 and warned that banks and trading firms were vulnerable to improbable events and exposed to losses beyond predictions modelled on standard scenarios. A year later the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) imploded.

Black Swans are therefore now used to describe extremely rare events that have very severe consequences. They are considered as not able to be predicted beforehand, though many claim they were predictable after the fact. COVID-19 has increasingly become the so-called Black Swan that society and business have feared. Given that Bill Gates in a famous Ted Talk in 2015 predicted such an event, in hindsight we should have seen it coming.

Black Swans question strategic considerations of, and approaches to, risk. Businesses, communities, and governments often spend so much time thinking about the probable that they rarely contemplate the immense impact of the highly unlikely!

For those of us and born and bred in Australia, it is the white swan which appears as the anomaly. We know about black swans. They are actually our norm. Black Swan logic therefore is all about ‘knowing’ and how we construct ‘knowledge’. Black Swan logic means that it is ‘what you don’t know’ that is far more important than ‘what you do know’. It further suggests we need to question and revisit the beliefs and assumptions around how we have constructed and acted on economic theory, history and industry macro trends, and how they actually might have helped us misunderstand the world and sent us down wrong pathways.

Questions to consider:

  • What key assumptions underpinning your business need to be revisited?
  • How adept is your business at predicting and responding to Black Swans?
  • What other Black Swans might be flying by that might impact or present opportunities for your business?

Everyone is familiar with the fairytale, "The Ugly Duckling" by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875). The story tells of a little bird born in a farmyard who was bullied by the others around him until, much to his delight (and to the amazement of others), he matured into a beautiful swan. The story is much loved around the world as a tale about both the rejection of difference and a transformation for the better.

In the face of Black Swans like COVID-19, successful businesses will typically go through 3 phases:  SHOCK – SURVIVE – TRANSFORM. In the current context we see the Australian government responding to the challenge of helping businesses survive the immediate shock with a multitude of initiatives. For those that can survive, the next and most significant challenge will be to transform. Transformation will require innovation, openness to diverse thinking and ideas, and resetting an agile strategy. It will be a collective challenge for businesses, governments, researchers and communities.

Questions to consider:

  • How is your business tapping into diversity and unlocking innovation?
  • What new connections does your business need to be forging at this time?
  • Are you taking time out to think about what the future might look like, how that might impact your business, and what your business could become?

When the terms ‘swanning around’ and ‘swanning about’ first appeared in the English language during the late nineteenth century, they simply described the process of swimming like a swan, and we all know how swans swim. They can be paddling furiously under the water, but all we see is their calm graceful movement across the water.

‘Swanning around’ and ‘swanning about’ has since emerged as an idiom that has come to mean moving about aimlessly, irresponsibly and in a carefree manner. Its current meaning seems to have originated during World War II. At that time, swanning around and swanning about described the movements of tanks in battle, in seemingly aimless maneuvers. In this sense, a pandemic is certainly not a time for swanning around.

Questions to consider:

  • How are you remaining calm during this challenging time?
  • Do you have the right mind-set to explore new possibilities?
  • What planning processes are you undertaking to guide impactful action that will enable your business to survive and transform?

Let me also share a local swan story. I am fortunate to live in the beautiful lakeside village of Paynesville on the iconic Gippsland Lakes in the south-east corner of Australia. Every Spring we take delight in the black swans raising their young in surprising harmony with people and pets on the foreshore. In a disrupted 2020, we are seeing cygnets in Autumn, well ahead of normal Spring breeding times. With the current unseasonal Autumn hatching, a well-known swan family has been proudly promenading their 4 cygnets for a few weeks now. Many concerned and caring local citizens earlier this week noticed one of those 4 cygnets unfortunately struggling with a mussel shell stuck on one of its small feet. The shell was significantly hampering the tiny cygnet’s movement. All well intended attempts by humans to free the cygnet of its impediment were repelled by very protective swan parents. Despite help at hand, regretfully it now appears that only 3 of the cygnets have survived.

Questions to consider:

  • What relevant help is out there in the form of people, tools and resources to help your business survive the pandemic? Is it in unexpected quarters?
  • How can you best leverage that help?
  • Where are the opportunities for collaborative effort?

History tells us that with all ‘black swan’ events there will be negative impacts as well as positive impacts. Amidst the tragic and unprecedented social and economic upheaval we are witnessing around the globe, it’s an uncomfortable but unavoidable historic fact that great pandemics often bring about positive reforms. As we all sit in physical isolation in the midst of COVID-19, we face an uncertain world; where the future is perhaps more unknowable than ever. There is no black and white road map for a way forward. However, and at the risk of mixing-up metaphors and fables, we should not lose hope that a black swan might just from time to time lay a golden egg, and all use this point in time to connect, collaborate, communicate, and co-innovate. Drawing on these principles, we just might be able to work at navigating the unknown and re-imagining a positive future that delivers a better balance of social, environmental and economic impacts.

Dr Nicola Watts

C4 Impact


Carina Turner

Sustainability and Waste Minimisation Officer

4y

Thank you Nicola. We have just come out of a meeting looking at some of the very valuable questions you have raised. The beauty, as you say, of this strange situation we find ourselves in, is the time we now have to answer some of these questions.

Zane Valujeva

Corporate Sustainability Strategist | B Corp Consultant | Life-long learner 🌱

4y

Great article! I highly appreciate you ending it on a positive note, especially with a mention of the need for collaboration, to which I also agree - now, the integration of cross-border collaboration within our ways of thinking, living and perceiving, might be more important than ever.

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