Issue No. 4. Dogs That Don’t Bark: Black Swan Events We Miss

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes famously solves a case based on what didn’t happen. A guard dog failed to bark when a racehorse was stolen—suggesting the thief was someone familiar.

At Amazon, this concept is baked into leadership thinking as “dogs not barking”: the critical signals we overlook because we expect disruption to come with noise, when in reality, the most transformative shifts often happen in eerie silence. This was often an important discussion point in the Amazon document reviews I attended.

And yet, as a society, we continue to miss these silent signals—until they turn into Black Swan events, seemingly appearing out of nowhere. But do they really? Or were we simply too distracted by barking dogs to notice the real threats creeping up behind us?

The Black Swan Illusion

Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term “Black Swan” to describe highly improbable, high-impact events that, in hindsight, seem obvious. Think of the dot-com crash. 9/11, the 2008 financial meltdown, and, of course, COVID-19. Each of these featured the sudden collapse of once-dominant companies. Each time, analysts scrambled to explain what happened, yet few had the foresight to call them out beforehand.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: all of these events were visible to those who were paying attention. It’s just that most of us were busy listening to the noisy barking dogs. We were obsessing over the usual indicators, reinforcing existing narratives, and dismissing weak but critical signals as noise.

Case Study: The Fall of Blockbuster

In 2000, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings famously offered to sell his struggling DVD-by-mail service to Blockbuster for $50 million. The offer was laughed out of the room. After all, the numbers didn’t justify a pivot. Brick-and-mortar stores were thriving. The data showed no sign of an existential crisis.

But the dogs weren’t barking at the right threat. The real danger wasn’t a tiny mail-order company but a slow, fundamental shift in consumer behavior—one that would explode with the rise of broadband and streaming. By the time Blockbuster did hear the alarm bells, it was too late.

Case Study: The Print Media Collapse

For years, traditional publishers ignored or downplayed digital media’s growing influence. The New York Times, Washington Post, and others continued optimizing print revenue, confident in their legacy power. Meanwhile, Craigslist quietly gutted classified ad revenue, Google siphoned off ad dollars, and social media began stealing audience attention in ways that weren’t immediately visible in quarterly reports.

By the time the industry realized what was happening, Black Swan-scale collapses were everywhere. Major newspapers shut down. Entire advertising models evaporated. And yet, to the few who had been watching, the signals had been there all along.

Dogs Not Barking in 2025

So, where are the silent signals today? What future “unforeseeable” crises will we later claim should have been obvious?

Here are a few potential candidates:

1. Retail Media's Reckoning – The rise of retail media networks (Amazon, Walmart, Target) looks unstoppable. But what happens when AI-driven marketplaces make brand loyalty irrelevant? When every purchase becomes hyper-optimized by machine learning, will CPG brands find themselves unable to differentiate? The real disruption might not be growth—it might be an existential cliff ahead.
2. The AI Content Bubble – AI-generated content is flooding the internet. But who’s measuring engagement versus volume? If consumers tune out, ad dollars dry up, and trust in online content erodes. Will we look back and wonder why we didn’t see the crash coming?
3. The Coming Disruption in Higher Education – Online learning was once seen as a niche alternative. But as AI tutors, AR/VR experiences, and skills-based hiring replace degrees, is a major university collapse closer than we think?

How to Hear the Silence

Leaders love dashboards, metrics, and reports. But real threats often live in the spaces between the data. So how do we train ourselves to listen for the dogs that aren’t barking?

• Look beyond trend lines – When something appears stable for too long, question it. Every dominant system eventually faces a breaking point.
• Pay attention to small anomalies – Big disruptions often start as tiny cracks. Think of the rise in people buying vinyl records in the early 2000s? They foreshadowed a billion-dollar resurgence in physical media.
• Question what no one is questioning – If an entire industry seems to be moving in one direction, ask what happens if they’re wrong.

In the end, it's fair to conclude that Black Swans aren’t as unpredictable as we sometimes pretend. Most of them started as silent shadows—noticed only by those who were wary, put in the effort to figure out where to look and had the discipline to look carefully.