The Grey Rhinos Are Gathering--Get Ready

It's October in America and the grey rhinos are gathering. We know they’re there. We catch glimpses of them on the evening news and our smart phone alerts. They creep into our conversations during the day and unsettle our minds as we fall asleep at night. While we realize they bring danger and risk, we don’t know what to do about them, individually or collectively.

So, we fail to prepare for them. Unwilling to take the time to understand them and fearful of trying to confront their pervasive impact, we just hope they will fade away.

But we know better. We’ve seen the havoc wreaked by grey rhinos before—government policies that led to the 2008 financial collapse, monetary policies that helped fuel inflation, reductions in defense spending and commitments that emboldened our enemies.

Recognizing the Grey Rhino

Popularized (and very effectively commercialized) by author and policy analyst Michele Wucker in her 2016 book called The Grey Rhino: Obvious Dangers We Ignore, the grey rhino metaphor is one of my all-time favorites.

Unlike the black swan, which is so rare that it is almost impossible to see in advance, the grey rhino is more common and more obviously dangerous. Like a black swan, it can have significant impact. Despite its dangers, we fail to recognize and prepare for the consequences a grey rhino may bring.

Why Are We So Ineffective in Dealing with Grey Rhinos?

Wucker says it’s because of their size and likelihood. As I think about it, grey rhinos are frequent enough, large enough and dangerous enough to be noticed and feared. But they are so big and so hazardous, and the risks they carry are often so complex, that we don’t know how to assess them. Worse, when we try to understand them, we quickly realize that we lack the ability to do much about them. This is one of the reasons we tend to blame politicians when the grey rhino creates havoc: Grey rhinos are frequently macro-level problems that require government-level detection and response to defeat.

The Critical Role of Government

This critical role of government is why the current gathering of grey rhinos is so concerning.

In an effective democracy, the government is us. We trust our government to deal with the grey rhinos, just as they deal with other threats. We trust our government (and our media) to identify the rhino risks and give us an objective assessment of those risks and the ways we can manage them.

Today, we have very little trust in our bitterly divided government. As the Pew Research Center reported in September 2023, “Fewer than two-in-ten Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right ‘just about always’ (1%) or ‘most of the time’ (15%). This is among the lowest trust measures in nearly seven decades of polling.” As Gallup has confirmed, our trust in the media has also plummeted. Building on a consistent double-digit gap in media trust between Democrats and Republicans since 2001, Gallup reports that Americans' trust in the media in 2022 remains sharply polarized along partisan lines, with 70% of Democrats, but only 14% of Republicans and 27% of independents, saying they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the media—statistics that potentially reflect the political slant of the stories and viewpoints presented.

We Are on Our Own Today

Simply put, we the people are more on our own in dealing with grey rhinos today than we have been in decades. Our government is more dangerously divided, less bipartisan, less effective, more focused on the political and social agendas of the far right and far left and less focused on the fundamental things needed to keep us safe. And we can no longer count on the media to give us the objective information we need even to see the grey rhinos coming, much less understand the threats they bring. It’s tough to prepare for a grey rhino when the party in power and much of the media all deny that the rhino exists.

This lack of effective government response is itself a grey rhino. We know the rhino’s there, we know it’s dangerous and we don’t know what to do about it. The more we try to understand it, the more fearful we become and the more powerless we feel to eliminate the risk—and worst of all, the more we realize that the threats posed by this overarching grey rhino increase the cumulative danger from all the other grey rhinos. ?

When we realize that the solution to a gray rhino is beyond our control, our government is unable or unwilling to protect us and much of our media is unwilling to admit that the rhino is even newsworthy, it’s easy to feel like we are in a terrifying nightmare where everything is beyond our control, and we are immobilized by fear and helpless to avoid disaster. In the nightmare, our only solution is to wake up. When we are already awake, we do the next best thing. We turn away from the rhino and try to think about something else, hoping—like the ostrich with its head in the sand—that we’ll be safe if we just can’t see it.

Recently Sighted Rhinos

Grey rhinos come in many shapes and sizes, with exponential differences in their likelihood and consequences. Climate change, nuclear holocaust and deadly viral or fungal pandemics are among the better known and more extreme examples. But the list of other grey rhinos is growing. Here are a dozen of the grey rhinos that have been gathering recently:

·?????? War or geopolitical instability involving developed, nuclear-capable or strategically significant countries, such as the blockade or invasion of Taiwan by China, the expansion of the Ukraine or Israel-Hamas wars or the collapse of Pakistan or Egypt.

·?????? Continued reduction in the ability of the U.S. to protect its citizens and interests at home and abroad, including the low level of the National Petroleum Reserve, the reduction in the artillery shell, air defense and tactical missile inventory resulting from weapons transferred to Ukraine and Israel, the reduction in America’s blue water Navy, the lack of hypersonic missile capability and growing global doubts about the U.S. as a reliable geopolitical partner.

·?????? Supply chain disruptions of critical raw materials and products that have significant impact on national defense, medical, technology or transportation applications, such as advanced semiconductor chips, essential pharmaceutical components, rare earth metals, lithium, automotive and other industrial components and electric vehicle batteries.

·?????? Energy policies and disruptions that adversely affect the U.S. electric grid or petroleum distribution networks, the availability or cost of oil, gas or oil-based products or the ability of the U.S. to be energy independent in the transition away from fossil fuels.

·?????? Banking instability in the U.S. fueled by recession, losses on commercial loans or longer-term government bonds, home mortgages or other assets.

·?????? Unexpected increases in longer-term interest rates such as home mortgages and ten-year Treasury bonds resulting from increased term premiums demanded by investors due to substantial increases in government deficits and borrowing.

·?????? Re-emergence of inflation resulting from wage-price spirals led by increased labor demands and strikes.

·?????? Gridlock in U.S. Congress, including extended government shutdowns, leadership vacuums or other inability to act decisively in response to domestic or foreign events.

·?????? Unexpected transition of presidential leadership in the U.S. (for example, from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris)

·?????? Domestic political violence in the U.S.

·?????? Other assaults on American democracy, whether from autocrats on the right, content bias or censorship on the left or gerrymandering and other strategies to alter voting rights and processes by both sides

·?????? Large-scale terrorist attack in the U.S.

Rhinos Are More Dangerous in Groups

As this limited list demonstrates, several of these grey rhinos could easily combine to create an even more complex and dangerous threat. Add any combination your select to our dysfunctional national government and the potential result is not comforting.

One note about politics: Although politicians may argue about the relative importance of a grey rhino or what to do about it, the grey rhinos themselves do not care about political agendas, party lines or virtue signaling. Their job is to wreak havoc wherever they hit. ?

How Do We Prepare for Grey Rhinos?

So, faced with these and other grey rhinos, what do we do?

Here are my suggestions.

1.?????? Stop playing ostrich. Don’t look away. Call out the grey rhinos as you see them.

2.?????? Push back from all the noise and distraction that is keeping us from focusing on the issues and threats that matter. On a relative basis, rhinos matter more than political agendas, politicians’ egos and the latest sociopolitical jargon.

3.?????? Take the time to understand the grey rhinos that are most relevant to you, your business and your family. Go beyond the buzzwords and sound bites to the substance. Escape from your echo chamber. Listen seriously to multiple points of view.

4.?????? Assess what you can do to reduce the impact of the rhinos that worry you most—then do it. By way of a few examples: Do what you can to prepare for supply chain and energy disruptions. Protect the safety of your bank deposits in a higher long-term rate environment. Update contingency and business continuation plans to improve self-sufficiency.

5.?????? Step up and speak up. Demand substantive action from our political leaders and our media. If a rhino hits, be sure you are one of the heroes who was willing to take a stand, not one of the wimps who looked away.

6.?????? If you are an advertiser, start demanding that media provide objective, nonpartisan coverage and honest debate on rhino issues. If you are going to criticize or support an issue, do your homework first.

7.?????? As we move into the 2024 election cycle, support candidates who are willing to focus on important issues rather than political tropes.

Whatever you do, do something. Today, more than ever, looking away is not an option. #risk #leadership #strategy #business #corporategovernance #management #marketing