'Predictable Surprises'

The subtitle of this new book is "The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming and How to Prevent Them."

The authors are Max Bazerman, a Harvard Business School professor, and Michael Watkins, who runs a strategic consultancy.

The book's published by the Harvard University Press, so it's got all the proper bells-and-whistles credentials of an "important" business book.

The authors define a predictable surprise as "an event or set of events that take an individual or group by surprise, despite prior awareness of all the information necessary to anticipate the events and their consequences."

Or, as Stefan Stern of The Financial Times put it in his review of the book, "this is a more elegant formulation of 'I might have known this would happen.'"

The book's authors concede that "people tend to believe in retrospect that an event was far more predictable than reality dictates."

Or, as bookofjoe might put it, echoing others far wiser, "hindsight is always 20-20."

Why do businesses and people not act on what they know to avoid predictable surprises?

The authors identify five "cognitive biases" which cause this.

1) We tend to have positive illusions that lead us to conclude that a problem does not exist or is not severe enough to merit action. (I call this hope)

2) We interpret events in an egocentric manner, allocating blame and credit in ways that are self-serving. (I call this denial)

3) We discount the future because it is easier to put off daunting measures today to prevent "far-off" disaster. (I call this laziness)

4) We cling to the status quo. (I call this insecurity)

5) We only start fixing problems when we have personally suffered harm or can see that danger is heading our way. (I call this expediency)

The authors also note the tendency to try to identify a single cause to complex problems, when there are probably several factors.

The authors don't simply look back and cluck about what should've been done, but put forth their predictions of big, highly unpleasant predictable surprises looming in our collective future.

Among them: the international pension shortfall; world farming crop shortages; and most seriously, global warming.

Business types have an insatiable appetite for books like this: witness last year's iteration, "Inevitable Surprises" by Peter Schwartz.

When I was still teaching residents the art and science of anesthesiology, I could predict which residents would be nightmares and which ones stars after doing one case with them.

Too bad that even after predicting which ones would be crummy, I still had to work with them for three years till they graduated.

That's one big reason I don't teach anesthesiology any longer.

[via Stefan Stern and The Financial Times]