Black Swan
Named by Nassim Nicholas Taleb after the discovery of black swans in Australia, which overturned the European assumption that all swans were white
A highly improbable event with three characteristics: it is unpredictable, carries massive impact, and after the fact we concoct explanations that make it appear less random than it was.
Used in the Books
This term appears in 3 chapters:
"When suppliers go offline, production halts globally within 24 hours. Loss: estimated $5-7 billion over 2-3 weeks of shutdowns. The black swan event exposed the vulnerability: Pure immediate use fails when scarcity is sudden and unpredictable. --- The Adaptation: Hybrid Storage Po..."
"reliability trade-offs through quantitative analysis. Unknown unknowns (uncertainty): You don't know what might fail or how. "Black swan" events that haven't occurred before and weren't anticipated. Example: COVID-19's sudden impact on aviation - nobody's risk models included "global p..."
"...ons (Clauset, Shalizi & Newman 2009, SIAM Review). Fat tails: When extreme events occur far more frequently than normal distributions predict - "black swan" events that should be once-per-century occur once per decade - distributions have fat tails characteristic of power laws or related extreme value di..."
Biological Context
Mass extinctions are black swan events—unpredicted catastrophes that reshape life on Earth. The Chicxulub asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, volcanic winters, and pandemic outbreaks all qualify. Evolution cannot anticipate black swans, only build systems robust enough to survive them.
Business Application
Black swan events dominate business outcomes: market crashes, breakthrough innovations, regulatory changes. Planning for the average ignores the events that matter most. Build systems that survive rare disasters rather than optimizing for normal conditions.