No Black Swans: How to increase expected outcomes and ensure success

One particular night at work, my partner Mike and I decided we were going to conduct a complete and exhaustive inventory of a notable cold case homicide. It was our intent to photograph the evidence, ensure that everything was accounted for, re-label evidence that was insufficiently documented, and see if we could come up with alternative theories about what happened the night of the murder. It was an ambitious plan, but the two of us were confident that we could complete the tasks at hand during a single 12-hour shift during which we would otherwise be unassigned to calls for service.?

As we made preparations for the project, we had opportunity to talk with our evidence technician, John, a retired veteran from our department with top-shelf talent, knowledge, and decades of experience. Awash in our hubris, we gushed about our plans for the evening. While he agreed that our process and plan was good, John thought we were wildly optimistic on the amount of time it would take us to do the job. Turns out, he was right. The inventory project took well over two nights and extended into a third. It was, however, an exceptionally fruitful exercise that yielded actionable evidence that assisted with the case.?

How did John know that it would take us as long as it did to complete our inventory? Easy. Experience, wisdom, and perspective. He had been in the game for over 40 years. He had personally done or supervised everything we were going to do, on many other cases, and had a good feel for what that would involve. The duration of our exercise was correctly predicted by John, and for us, it fell outside of our expected outcome.?

“I just knew that was going to happen”

You’ve probably heard, or said, that statement before.?Well, how? Until clairvoyance is settled science and widely adopted and people start predict their futures, we can only base our assumptions on what will happen on two things: knowledge and experience. Some people like surprises, but usually only when they’re good ones. Most people don’t like bad surprises.?

Perhaps you've heard of the "Black Swan Theory." Back in 16th-century London, black swans were thought not to exist; that all swans had white feathers. This changes in 1697 when a Dutch explorer observed black swans in Western Australia.

These days, a black swan is used as a metaphor to describe a a surprise with significant consequence. Something that was unforseen but in hindsight, really should have been expected. The modern theory, developed by Nassim Taleb, asserts that a true Black Swan event is an outlier, carries significant consequence, and "despite its outlier status, forces us to develop explanations for its occurance after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."

When you’re young, you learn things all the time. What does a burnt cookie taste like? How many hot dogs is too many? What will happen if I roll around in the grass? Each of these experiences can be filed away for future recall to inform future decisions.?

Consider anything that you do as falling within a finite continuum of all possible outcomes:?

When you have limited perspective, the range of expected outcomes is small, overshadowed by all possible, but unexpected outcomes. You’re more likely to be surprised by how something turns out, for better or worse, than you are to have predicted it.?

As your own inventory of experiences and knowledge grows, that small area of expected outcomes expands, pushing the outliers to the edges of possibility.?

It’s a wonderful thing to get to a place where you can say “I’m not sure what exactly what will happen, but it will be within this upper and lower limit.” Your tolerance for that outcome and those limits is also a factor, of course. Ideally, you get to a point where you’re surprised less and less by what happens and you are more and more equipped and prepared.?

“Good outcomes are caused.” - Michael Hyatt

So how to accelerate that expansion of knowledge and range of possibilities??

There are several ways:

1. Be purposeful about learning.?

Read. Talk with people. Commit to retaining knowledge. Seek understanding in all things and train yourself to be curious about how things work or why things happened. You may be lucky and are naturally this way, or you may have to adjust how you look at things.?

2. Gain Experience. Everywhere, all the time

Do things. Create for yourself opportunities to generate a bank of experiences to draw upon. Commit to learning how to repair your car, or dishwasher. Don’t shy away from the hard things and when mistakes or unfortunate events occur, resolve yourself to learn from them.?

3. Prepare your mind to be flexible.?

You’re going to encounter situations and problems which fall outside of those expected outcomes, and when you do, there will be a need to adapt for success. Begin to train yourself to think about things from a "all possible outcomes" perspective. We're all very good at making reasonable assumptions about what will happen, but do we always consider everything that could happen?

Shoulders, not guardrails.?

There is one last place on the continuum to talk about, and that is the shoulder region between the expected and unexpected outcomes. This is the area of improvisation and adaptation. Where the outcome or event is outside of your assumptions, but within your ability to adjust and address. Just as it is important to increase your abilities and understanding, so too is it important to expand your ability to respond to unexpected.?

A final story.?

My grandfather was a member at his country club for over 40 years. He graciously brought my brother and I there to play as we learned many times. He played hundreds, if not thousands of rounds of golf there.?

On several occasions,, as we learned on his home course, he would watch me hit an errant shot, patiently wait for me to climb back into the cart, and say “Let’s go see if we can find your ball.”?

This was usually followed by a statement similar to “I’ve played this course for 40 years and you take me to places I’ve never been.” Here’s the thing:?

All of that bad golf made me a better golfer. I learned how to improvise and create shots from strange angles. I developed an understanding of how the ball worked on hillsides and on poor ground. I learned how to estimate distances without the help of a range finder or marks on the fairway, usually because I wasn’t there very much. These experiences helped me learn and feel comfortable operating in those shoulder areas, where it was up to me to function with ambiguity and risk, uncertainty and a “less expected” outcome.?

Those were great experiences for us, and I don’t play a round of golf now without thinking of him and those sorts of lessons.?

You will be more successful if you’re better equipped and more able to leverage the resources available, namely your knowledge and experience. Growing those resources better positions you for success. The only thing left is to answer this question:

How will you go about making that happen??

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