Black Swan Thinking

Many years ago, I worked a shift at dayjob where shit well-and-truly hit the fan. We were preparing for one of our busiest periods of the year–lots of incoming calls from lots of panicked writers looking to double-check a big opportunity™ deadline, while simultaneously trying to prep for other big projects that were coming up.

Big opportunity™ deadline days weren’t fun days at the best of time, but within the first hour of this one kicking off shit started going wrong. One staff member’s flight home had been delayed by twenty-four hours. Another staff member called in sick (from memory, they were heading to hospital). Our then-CEO was incomunicado for the day (for reasons I don’t recall), and the two other staff members on deck were both relatively new to the organisation. On top of that, i was relatively new to the role I was working and the projects I was working on. It was a time of transition, new staff coming in and old staff taking on new positions, everyone trying to find their feet in the new landscape.

All other tasks on the docket went by the wayside as two of us downed tools and answered phone calls for the next seven hours. An unrelenting stream of phone calls, constantly asking the same handful of questions. The third staff member present–who, from memory, wasn’t actually meant to be there and had come in to get ahead on the big opportunity™ deadline project–pitched in and did some of the sorting so we could focus on the customer service.

The day ended, as submission days tended to do, with a manic burst of activity and panicked writers trying to double-check just how close to the wire they could cut things. Five o’clock came and we downed tools, sorted things, and celebrated with that nervous, relieved laughter that only arrives when the day has been crazy, yet you’ve handled it well and finished without succumbing to the madness.

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The next week, parts of our management team went into evaluate mode trying to figure out what procedures we could implement in order to prevent such a thing from happening again. We already had guidelines around how many people needed to be in the office in order to stay open to the public (a minimum of two), and when people could take leave, but the reaction to a big, manic day of hell was legislate all the ways it wouldn’t happen again.

We’d stumbled into the phenomena that economic theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb has dubbed a Black Swan Event, used to describe a moment in crises that both a) involve a very high level of rare, hard-to-predict events that are beyond the scope expectations set by experience and current understandings of the state of play, and b) hold considerable sway on future thinking because we’re psychologically blind to the role uncertainty and chance played in setting up the event.

Or, the short version, an unpredictable event that’s a massive outlier occurs, and we waste all sorts of energy trying to prevent it happening again.

There was a lot of low-probability chance of this particular day being the focal point of so many people being out of the office, and even then it was only a problem because it coincided with the one day in a whole 365 day year that was the final day to submit to a big opportunity™ that got our base all riled up.

In the six years I worked at QWC, it was the sole time someone missed their flight home after taking leave, and the sole time we were without a CEO and an acting CEO in the office when we weren’t expecting it. It wasn’t the sole time a staff member got sick, but in 99% of cases someone taking sick leave wasn’t a big deal because it wasn’t a high pressure day with lots of queries from panicking writers.

So we talked about what we could do to prevent it from happening again, and the suggestion was basically: do nothing. We couldn’t predict a day like that happening again, and there weren’t any reasonable precautions against it. Rationalising that we could have was applying hindsight to an unpredictable event.

There were, frankly, better uses for our time.

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Thinking about this a lot right now, because I wrote very little on the fiction and thesis front last week. There were a confluence of factors that influenced this, among them:

• I had a stack of marking to grade, which always escalates my tendency towards anxiety
• The lead-in to Father’s Day was rough, both via advertising and the subtle uptick of movies with relationships-with-your-dad themes on various streaming platforms.
• I was prepping Short Fiction Lab #4 for launch, but noticing that it was headed for the weakest sales of the series thus far.
• I was prepping some other projects for launch later in the year, which sucked up a little time.
• I’d hit a transition point in my thesis draft, and needed to revisit some notes I’d made two years ago. Because we’d reorganised the flat, those notebooks weren’t where i remembered.
• I’d hit a complex point in my fiction draft, and got a little stuck.

Now, these weren’t entirely unpredictable, but some of them did catch me off-guard. You can’t predict when your subconscious is going to latch onto a problem in your manuscript that you haven’t consciously noticed yet, and this was my first time trying to manage the grief over losing a parent as the major milestones came up.

Obviously, I knew it would be rough, but had no idea how rough or what was going to trigger it (Netflix was a killer, with its seasonal algorithms kicking dad movies into the recommended viewing queue). Even with all that, my suspicion that a good chunk of how rough it was actually stemmed from marking anxiety.

Similarly, i knew my writing tended to dip during release weeks, and also while marking, but there is a big difference between ‘dipping’ and ‘stalling out entirely.’

Despite this, I’d hit a confluence of events that mixed together into a potent disruption, and I immediately started looking for things that would prevent it from ever happening again. I started rewriting business plans and rethinking how i was going to monetise writing projects on the docket. I pulled new ideas out of my arse because they were shiny, figuring they’d be an obvious next choice.

I succumbed, in short, to black swan thinking on the micro level, and started trying to figure out how to manage unpredictability out of existence.

It wasn’t until Sunday, when the marking was done and I’d had a morning to brainstorm the issues with the story I was writing, that I finally caught my breathe and realised what I was doing.

Now, there was some use to the black swan induced mania last week, but those usages largely came because it opened up new avenues of thought rather than gave me useful solutions. It wasn’t until things calmed down that I started to see how those solutions could be implemented much later and much better, compared to slapping something together on the fly to try and solve the unsolvable problem.

I’ve flagged them for further thinking and planning, rather than immediate action.

And yesterday, I fired up my thesis file and my current draft and got back to work, trusting in the process and the business plan that’s gotten me this far into the year. The sole change I’ve made to my process is slapping a honking great eight-hour Freedom session on the writing computer Monday to Friday, rather than just the first three hours of the work day.

‘Cause my process may not be 100% right, but it’s done me right enough thus far, and writing is a better use of my time than any other solution I might come up with.