You know, one of the things that amazes me to no end is how often people in cars just cut in front of you, leaving precious little space and causing you to have to brake hard and hopefully not have the asshole tailgating you rear end you.And it's a whole bunch of things about this that amazes me. Did they not go to physics class and learn about MASS and INERTIA?
But what it really is is that they can't imagine disaster.
Well, I can. But humans seem to be resistant to imagining the worst. The real actual worst.
For example, even though some people at British Petroleum were very open about how difficult it is to drill deep water wells, other people at BP were making decisions to use cheaper, weaker, pipes that they had seen blow before and that violated BP's safety standards. (See this article in the NYTimes "Documents Show Early Worries About Safety of Rig") So even though people were aware that things could go wrong, they didn't imagine that it could actually go so spectacularly wrong and couldn't think strategically about what would happen if it did. Because they were expecting everything to be fine.
Just like, how did Condi Rice put it?, no one could know that terrorists would strike the U.S., even though there was a security memo saying exactly that.
Or just like everyone knew that housing prices were totally askew and that there was a bubble but we continued to act like housing prices could never fall, that buying mortgage based assets that were based on sub-prime loans that were rated A by Moodys or S&P because they were being paid by the issuer was not Damocles's Sword about to fall on our little heads. The occasional nay sayers of this scheme were ignored as no fun, and of course the mortgage crisis unraveled a whole lot more, no one was expecting total economic collapse.
I keep on hearing about "Strategic Thinking" and how the best and the brightest of the business world are strategic thinkers. And I think not. If strategy, as defined by my Oxford English Dictionary is "a plan for successful action based on the rationality and interdependence of the moves of opposing or competing participants." then strategy needs to incorporate the possibility of disaster. The worst case scenario can happen. And it can happen suddenly and blow you out of the water.
