I was on Slate.com the other day and a review of the recent book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb jumped out at me.

I'd first heard of the author from my friend Michael Sperger a year ago when he was chairing the SCIP conference in New York and was shortlisting keynotes, having read Taleb's earlier book, "Fooled by Randomness" (Michael chose Jim Surowiecki instead).

Now, I'm not much of a determinist myself but the central notion that highly improbable events through history are the ones that have shaped modern civilization and the inherent unpredictability of these events in the future makes the work of intelligence in business a good deal tougher. In fact, as pattern recognizers, we must help to manage the risk of threats emerging that look like threats we've seen before; but what happens when it's something entirely new and equally as devastating as, say, the 9/11 attacks were on the national psyche? (read more)